well. whenever there's safe that it be freed up a. woman with. a little of the world. will. come along the moment. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

for. welcome back the big picture on tom hartman coming up in this half hour it's becoming a trail of ghost towns across the south as residents from louisiana to mississippi leave for their homes here of approaching what waters some projected at nearly

twenty feet so who are what's to blame for the severe flooding overseas another disaster continues to unveil as thousands of families dozens of miles away from the fukushima plant had to leave their homes this weekend to escape high levels of radiation over ever be a glimmer of hope for the people of japan and the debt ceiling has been reached does america have to break the roof as well as financial ties with allies before republicans get a clue. thanks to a record breaking rainfall last month the mississippi rivers overflowing for an enormous flood waters across the easy animists a city missouri is going to see several billions of dollars of damage has been reported the army corps of engineers is now relieving pressure on new orleans levees by flooding thousands of acres in the easy emma and desperate bid to save

that city from drowning in a disaster worse that country in so record breaking twisters a few weeks ago record breaking floods now billions upon billions of dollars in damages just this month the republicans are pressing ahead denying climate change in fact of the forty three members of congress representing the afflicted states thirty eight have voted to block the e.p.a. from enforcing greenhouse gas regulations so how many more homes destroyed and people killed it will take for republicans to accept that we're living in dangerous times with an increasingly volatile climate as a result of our destructive energy policy joining me now to talk about these issues is dr patrick michaels a climatologist and senior fellow and byron nelson he's of the cato institute for america's welcome. nice to see you and i see. the army corps of engineers predicts how often really bad floods happen in up until last fifteen years or so the predictions have been spot on but now and just last twenty years since one thousand

nine hundred we've had. one in every five hundred year event one hundred eighty three one two hundred year flood in two thousand and eight one hundred year flood two thousand and one to fifty year floods five twenty five year floods and between ninety seven and two thousand and two just five years we saw for twenty year floods you talk about there's five reside in one basin you know. i'm not sure exactly where is this house with but the point is that you know we have over the last twenty years we have about five percent more moisture in the atmosphere because it's warmer so you would expect you know we have a storm that was a mile wide him. idea i actually studied this and i don't know if you have the graphic that i sent you to put up but i do it because that would you call it up and he's going to see the increase in precipitation in the heaviest day of the gear and i think that's a really good metric because think about it it rains on the average seventy eighty days and he says here this is you there it is right there and you can see somewhere

around one hundred fifty nine hundred sixty all the sudden start to get these these higher events on single days and that's consistent with the warmer atmosphere in the gulf of mexico which is the source of moisture for much of the mississippi basin warms up a little bit and you see this increase so i'm not surprised to see this kind of like. the how do you ok then when you're not a climate change denier well no climate obviously changes the point the point of the iran's talking about you have to go after anthropogenic of course i mean i know you've written for years that people are involved in the warming trend begins around a bit like let me let me show you a graph here of changes in c o two and methane. this is this is going back two thousand years and the first iteration of this is called the hockey stick you guys made fun of it in fact there are you have written that it was for that it was an accurate hockey stick was a temperature curve this is a greenhouse gas current sure but this is actually ok so here we are so we're

looking at carbon dioxide methane and nitrous oxide greenhouse gases and it looks to me like we're experiencing a spike here since you know over the last hundred years or so or well rather substantial what's what's really weird about your graph it's got the carbon dioxide see that it's pushing it's a three seventy three section of throwing rocks that are not i'm sorry let's be inside there i think of the right hand side well that you know these are well known numbers and. it's not surprising that along with that you see a warming of late twentieth century these gases don't have everything to do with the warming that's occurred or they have something to do with it but i let's get back. in the pre-open there's actual variability there's there is land use changes there's all kinds of not to not not fair not do things though that over the just over a twenty or thirty or fifty year period i mean those that variability when you when you look over hundreds of thousands of years he have searched terms of thousands of years but the land use changes are relatively recent you have to understand that we took the middle north america and changed it for the long grass prairie into corn

and so i think that has a lot of different rate of characteristics and by the way also effects the runoff which has some influence on the floods we have right now in the mississippi basin one of the things i think we need to pay attention to now there is a big tornado outbreak the. no one has a group national oceanic and atmospheric administration the climate sleuths or something like that and they put out what were least a couple of weeks ago on was that related to global warming and they concluded no because the factors that were involved in this particular super outbreak was a great outbreak let me tell you you actually expect would become a less frequent under global warming for the wind shear that's the spin the cause is the tornado and the strength of the jet stream which is related to the temperature difference between the pole and the equator and there's a third factor which would go up in global warming and that's the moisture feed

from the gulf of mexico which would supply more energy but they kind of concluded that it looked like it was a push and there's the moisture in the atmosphere as well i mean it's just. we haven't seen ocean. actually know most of us are in the atmosphere comes from from evaporation from from the oldest green things some the ocean the oceans are deserts evaporative we know the paper press one tree will evaporate more moisture in a year than there forty acres of ocean the vapor pressure of water is proportional to water vapor is proportional to the temperature of the water in an ocean surface that's a forty degrees celsius and has zero hundreds of times more moisture just emanating into the air in the surface it's near freezing trees don't show that kind of difference on a per unit area basis trees are giant water problems well you know the house of thousand gallons of water every year and i think i have read it was an elementary hydrology textbook look at the water budget and see how large is portion of what falls on come from the ocean unfortunately or fortunately the i mean if you want of

all six of the planets you know he was ok you know you're still putting more and more moisture in the atmosphere and it's a greenhouse gas and you cannot. have water vapor as you know absolutely absolutely so do we. what's your what's your prescription for doing something about this well that's where we differ and we've had this discussion before i think the idea i think that an on t.v. i think that the. warming that you're seeing. is at the relatively low end of the projection range is given for the what we call the mid range of mission scenarios for the united nations. and that means that you actually have time to develop the technologies that remember if they're more efficient they're probably going to be people cost less to you know we're over three fifty parts per and this is the level at which james hansen said you know all of this is the human race has ever experienced well just the answer is not what we would have to do jim

anson says but we adapt to we are species that lives between the surface temperature of minus forty and plus for all i have no doubt that you know the human race will hear this but we may see huge swaths of what we're currently living there and i want to see if i get you to agree with all these refugees and say that we have a lot of them that are we have. we put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere about six thousand or six million metric tons per year in united states or something like that is nineteen point two eight thousand billion six guys it's not six victims rights billion really good numbers ok the chinese are now producing forty two percent more per year than we do and so in every year that differential gets greater and greater and greater so you get to the situation where pretty much no matter what the united states does unless the other nations are going to emit weiss as much as we are in the not too distant future to cut their emissions you're not going to change that have china has it all in the south and they are now the

world's largest producer of solar panels they we had the two largest solar two of the three largest solar companies the united states and now moved their production to china china is now the largest consumer of solar panels. you know in europe germany and china's emissions are going up like crazy so they are never said that they are going to reduce them never ever while they work on five year plans this it's a planned economy it is a good time of the people's republic of china i would even a five year plans don't necessarily work when the chinese give you a condo you take and they say we're going to have it and started we. thank you so much for being here so i appreciate you dropping by. three or to go ok. thank you both a millionaire oil executives realize they'll get a skate climate change either oh wait that's right they can afford million dollar waterproof bunkers one of the fastest growing industries in the united states specifically designed for rich people to avoid everything from floods to well for years the rest of us though.

yesterday the japanese government widened the evacuation zones surrounding the melted down fukushima nuclear plant more than five thousand people left their homes on sunday after being as exposed to high levels of radiation last week it was discovered that a nuclear meltdown did indeed occur inside reactor one of the plant which has officials concerned about the status of the other more volatile reactors at the plant there are currently over three thousand tons of highly radioactive waste water underneath reactor one and should neither japanese affair officials are scrambling to figure out a way to get out of there recently on the show right now on foot as physicist michio kaku said this about the situation. how credible do clear powerplant it's stable all in the sense that a time bomb is also stable a small earthquake a pipe break could set it off because it's just hanging there by your fingernails

so imagine being on a cliff and hanging like your fingernails and one by one your fingernails start to crack that's a situation at the reactor right now it's stable so what do these new developments mean for japanese officials who are hoping to have the disaster contained in the coming months paul gans or the director of the reactor oversight project beyond nuclear and joins me now welcome back thank you see you we learned last week that a meltdown did occur indeed in reactor one you had been saying that several weeks ago on this program was loaded with all did the japanese just finally knowledge of it or did they. i found the evidence of what they had acknowledged they expected or you know well if you i think euphemistically the nuclear industry calls this operator rock the mizzen where they keep holding out for whole when in fact the facts speak much louder happened in three mile island it happened in chernobyl information is the first thing to control when the reactors are out of control yeah

of course you know p.r. at all costs so cutting through the p.r. you keep close tabs on these things around the world around the united states around the world and you've been watching from the sheema reactors what is the current status of what's going on. well right now. actually today the tokyo electric power company admitted that all three reactors are in melted down the first three the first units one two and three we've got. the reactor. spent fuel pools in units one two in three and four in complete shambles so the radiation levels are rising now. they were down they've been spiking on and off i think the clearest evidence is that the emergency planning zones are now expanded beyond thirty kilometers in fukushima what we're actually watching right now

is an evacuation of children and pregnant women beyond thirty kilometers and this is a sure fire sign that the permanent solution zones are going to grow now even beyond the twenty kilometers they already today u.s. government as i recall had recommended fifty dollars they actually recommended out to fifty miles fifty miles and so are the japanese moving in the direction of what our recommendations were a month ago absolutely and this ago this is the concern is that you know we think that this is actually bordering on criminal activity to hold back information from the public to order tens of thousands. as the japanese to stay in their homes when we when we knew that the reactors were militant down you know information was being deliberately withheld from the japanese public and from the world for that matter but more particularly for vulnerable populations. you know what this is a clear violation of human rights that these people were not provided with

a responsible government reaction even when the united states was ordering its own nationals to back off fifty miles away from this plane. two contrasting stories one in today's new york times about how often there have been these warnings from from engineers and whatnot that have been ignored legal challenges that have been ignored from everything to the construction to the operation of nuclear power plants all over japan. and to a couple of days ago the japanese government announced that the fifty percent nuclear power goal they had set for the year twenty twenty was being replaced with a fifty percent solar wind biomass renewable goal. it seems like kind of bad news in retrospect good news going forward are the japanese learning from this absolutely but it grieves us that it had come at the cost of so many lives that the quality of life for future generations

in northern japan is has been sacrificed clearly and it comes too late for much of the japanese economy and a large portion of the population clearly those of us who've been the cassandra voice in. renewables are the viable choice of the future we're happy to see this but you have to see the committed here you'll see that i'm not at all so we were happy to see the commitment shift to renewable energy but again it grieves us to the to see it come at such a cost the cost of what ultimately may be thousands tens of thousands of lives and they can have a nation the ocean absolutely the figures are you know they're not really available right now because we're talking about consequences generations to come clearly what has happened is that this is going to be a devastation of the japanese economy as well so you know there are many layers of that this axis playing out on paul early on on

this program you and i talked about how you know so much of this water there. they're sustaining these crippled reactors by just pumping water continuously and of them in there like giant serves the water's going back out into the ocean and how much radiation have been dumped into the ocean unintentionally intentionally. sitting in the food chain at what point can we expect to see radioactive seafood could the japanese expect to see it and can we expect to see it starting to show up but not in the larger organisms in the food chain and is anything and we just have a minute left i'm sorry and is there anything being done to look out for that by the u.s. government the japanese government well right now the latest word is that. seaweed forty miles off the coast of japan is significantly contaminated this is only an indicator that the concentrations of radioactivity in the oceans are bio magnify

unfortunately what we're seeing here in the united states is that the environmental protection agency the food and drug administration and no are all backing away for and. bringing down the monitoring so milk for example we've gone to a schedule now of monitoring milk in the united states for fukushima radiation every three months so rainwater is now being monitored only every month in the united states so they're actually their own grading the monitoring levels in the united states and the the way the three monkeys absolutely the f.d.a. has made the announcement last week that they're not going to monitor tuna and salmon for radioactivity of the pacific amazing absolutely amazing. thanks again thanks for the very worthy of you and spreading the word this disaster has forced japan to reconsider its future of nuclear power they reverse their decision to have nuclear power count for half of all their energy production instead they're going

to rely on renewable sources like solar for that half germany two is ditching nuclear power with plans to close their last nuclear plant by two thousand and twenty and jump in head first into solar power and energy source with which they lead the world at the moment meanwhile here in the u.s. we're still using expensive and dirty nuclear and dirty coal and imported oil and natural gas from fracking which pollutes wells and groundwater with no plans to stop any of this any time soon sign for a new energy policy in the united states we just have to kick the fossil fuel billionaires and their shills out of politics first. coming up will we have to dig into the funds of hardworking americans to save us from overall financial disaster . for.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry because the big picture. is just. the good the bad and the very very conspicuously. the good high school sophomore any meyers in new jersey

student issued a challenge to congresswoman michele bachmann a dual of wits on the u.s. constitution in a letter the congresswoman miers wrote representative bachmann a frequent inability you've shown to accurately and factually present even the most basic information about the united states led me to submit the following challenge pitting my public education against your advanced legal education so you bachmann accepted the challenge though i'd argue that tenth graders knowledge of the united states may be too much for bachmann she probably needs to go head to head with a fifth grader than a job or even a bad georgia republican governor nathan deal so much for the fourth the state of journalism georgia after a local news affiliate ran a scathing article about potential ethics violations coming out of the governor's office governor barbour reporters from that affiliate from covering a bill signing ceremony until they apologized for the article in the words governor

deal's off this is trying to censor news coverage of his administration is he taking a page out of hosni mubarak's playbook or just another republican procrit. and a very very ugly ron paul like father like son last week rand paul compared universal health care to slavery and over the weekend his dad a rendezvous. same thing here and on fox news yes yesterday morning ron paul was challenged that the general welfare clause of the constitution seems to allow for the creation of national health insurance and he came up with this response it was the decision of the supreme court in one thousand nine hundred thirty seven. when they said that social security was constitutional under article one section eight i said it's the constitution and of course said slavery was legal to it and we had to reverse that so since one hundred thirty seven i don't think so ron anyhow because making sure people are healthy and slaving them of the same thing i want

a family dinner is like it befalls and you pass the potatoes now that's some form of slavery and that's very very ugly. right now there's only one thing standing in between the united states and economic collapse as our ability to borrow from the pension funds of federal employees because republicans won't drop their war against the working class our nation hit its debt limit today for seem treasury secretary tim geithner to resort to extreme measures like borrowing federal employee pension funds just to keep us from defaulting on our debt around the world a default that most economists say would trigger the next great depression the economists experts most politicians even the chamber of commerce are begging for a plea bill done that only does one thing to raise the debt ceiling arguing that we

can't afford to play games with such high stakes let's go in on the republican leadership is playing games passing the revolver around with one bullet in the cylinder. both speaker of the house john boehner and senate minority leader mitch mcconnell have warned that they won't bring republicans on board to raise the debt ceiling and list trillions of dollars are cut out of entitlement programs like medicare and medicaid if disaster wasn't hanging in the balance this would be really really funny considering the both boehner and mcconnell had no problem whatsoever turning clinton's budget surplus into a massive budget deficit under george w. bush they did it by two wars without a single penny raised to pay for them a massive medicare part d. prescription drug program that forces the government to pay retail giving drug companies billions while throwing medicare into a crisis and hundreds of billions of dollars in tax giveaways for millionaires and billionaires courtesy of the bush tax cuts that have people over the doubt from

these guys back then and not a peep about the debt when their hero ronald reagan ran up nearly three trillion dollars over the debt in eight years more than any other president in history from george washington to jimmy jimmy carter combined not to mention the danger of mcconnell have already voted to increase the debt limit eight different times in congress eight times without hesitation so why the foot dragging now could it be that republicans really do want us to default but they want to bring about the next great depression and forever link president obama and the democrats with economic disaster just like what happened in herbert hoover is this the scorched earth policy the republicans talked about when obama won the presidency and they're doing to destroy the democrats for a generation the way hoover destroyed the republicans we'll find out but something tells me that even they don't understand just how bad things could get if we do end

up defaulting on our debt but don't take my word for. take this guy's word for who said the full consequences of a default or even the serious prospect of default by the united states are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate the integration of the full faith and credit of the united states would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value that our dollar in exchange markets a nation can ill afford to allow such a result the risks the costs and disruptions and the incalculable incalculable damage lead me to about one conclusion the senate must pass this legislation and who said this. ronald reagan himself back in one thousand nine hundred seventy even the patron saint of the republican party would have wanted a clean bill to raise the debt ceiling. so let's stop playing games just raise the

damn debt ceiling and then we can argue about how republicans want to screw over working people next week as the big picture for more information on the stories we covered visit our website at tom hartman dot com in our teeth are also check out our you tube page is that you tube dot com slash the big picture r t you tube dot com slash. and this entire show is available as a free video podcast on i tunes and don't forget democracy begins when you get out there and get active tag your it will see them all.

more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world seeing from the streets of canada after. shanghai corporations are all day.