well. we never got the. safe ready. freedom. of movement. in the world. will. come along when the minimum. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for link please 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 knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

for. what about the big picture i'm 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 from their homes fear of approaching floodwaters some projected at nearly

twenty feet so cool or 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 breached does america have to break the roof as well as financial ties with allies before republicans get a clue. thanks to record breaking rainfall last month the mississippi river is overflowing for an enormous flood waters across the easy and a mississippi in missouri and tennessee several billions of dollars in 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 katrina 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 people killed it will take for publicans to accept that we're living in dangerous times with an increasingly volatile climate as a result of our destructive energy policy going to be now to talk about these issues dr patrick michaels a climatologist and senior fellow environmental studies at the cato institute are marvels 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 in just the last twenty years since ninety

ninety. one every five hundred year event one hundred 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 before so for ten year floods you're talking about there's five percent in one basin you know. actually i'm not sure exactly where is the problem with here's a 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 and so you would expect you know we just have a storm that was a mile wide and. i think that 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 you toss it up on the screen 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 rains on the average seventy eighty days in these year this is you that is right there and you can see somewhere around

one hundred fifty nine hundred sixty you start to get these these higher events on single days and that's consistent with a warmer atmosphere 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 new craze so i'm not surprised to see this kind of thing. the how do you. then when you're not a climate change denier well no climate obviously changes the point the point of the iran's valuable answer more anthropogenic of course i mean i know you've written for years that people are involved but that warming trend begins around you so if i let me let me show you a graph here of changes in c o two and methane and this is this is going back two thousand years and the first iteration is called the hockey stick you guys made fun of it in fact there are you have written that it was for the it was inaccurate hockey stick was a temperature curve this is a greenhouse gas sure but this is actually ok so here we are so we're looking at

a carbon dioxide methane and nitrous oxide all 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. thirty seven to go here it's research that's throwing rocks i don't know i'm sorry i haven't actually i left 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 they have something to do with it what let's get back to the pretty open cattle variability of their stuff and there is land use changes all kinds of. things though that over the just over a twenty or thirty or fifty year period i mean those that have variability when you when you look over hundreds of thousands of years yes or tens of thousands of years but then when things change it's a relatively recent you have to understand that we took the middle north america

and changed it for a long grass prairie and so it's corn and soybeans and has a lot of different rate of characteristics and by the way also affects the runoff which has some influence on the floods that we have in the mississippi basin one of the things i think we need to pay attention to now there is a big tornado outbreak in the. no and as a group national oceanic and atmospheric administration the climate sleuths or something like that and they put out a release 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 operate was a great outbreak let me tell you you actually expect would become less frequent under global warming for the wind shear that's the spin that causes the tornado and the strength of the jet stream which is related to the temperature difference between the pole and the equator now there's a third factor which would be a walk in global warming and that's the moisture feet from the gulf of mexico which

would supply more energy but they kind of concluded that it looked like it was a push and those are just there's the moisture in the atmosphere as well i mean it's just we have to see oceans. actually know most most are in the atmosphere comes from from evaporation from from the ocean green things from the ocean the oceans are deserts evaporative we know the vapor pressure one tree will evaporate normally journey or that there are forty acres of ocean the vapor pressure of water is proportional to water papers is proportional to the temperature of the water in an ocean surface that say forty degrees celsius only has zero hundreds of times more moisture just emanating into the air than a surface near freezing trees don't show that kind of difference on a per unit area basis trees in china as well response you know the house of god gallons of water every year and i think i have it was an elementary hydrology textbook look at the water budget and see how largest portion of what falls on us

comes from the ocean unfortunately or fortunately believe me if you want i'll six of the planet yeah you know you're still putting more and more moisture in the atmosphere and it's a greenhouse gas i mean come on that water vapor is yeah 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 of the idea i think that and 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 emissions scenarios from the united nations. and that means that you actually have time to develop the technologies but remember if they're more efficient they're probably going to be people and cost less but hey you know we're over three fifty parts per yeah well this is the level at which james hansen said you know above this. human race is never serious well james hansen says now would

we would we have to do jim hansen says that 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 through this through what we may see huge swaths of what we're currently living there and i want to see if i can get you to agree with all these refugees and so you are probably the last minute we have. equal carbon dioxide in the atmosphere about six thousand or six million metric tons per year in the united states or something like that is nineteen point two eight thousand billion six guy to six hundred that's right so we get on some billion really big 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 that are going to admit twice as much as we are in the not too distant future cut their emissions you're not going to change that have china i

said are in the south and they are now the world's largest producer of solar panels they have the two largest solar two of the three largest solar companies the united states and now move their production to china china is now the largest consumer of solar panels. in europe germany and china is emissions are going up like crazy so they are first said that they are going to reduce them never ever will they work on five year plans this it's a planned economy is a good time other people's republic which i haven't even five year plans necessarily were when the chinese give you a condo you have a and they say we're going to have your. we're flat thank you so much for me because i appreciate you dropping by. three or you go ok. thank you both the millionaire oil executives realize they can't escape climate change either way that's right bill you can afford million dollar waterproof bunkers one of the fastest growing industries in the united states specifically designed for rich people who want everything from flood story fires 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 is 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 and are currently over three thousand tons of highly radioactive waste water underneath reactor one that shouldn't be there japanese officials officials are scrambling to figure out a way to get out of there recently on the show we're now on foot as physicist michio kaku said this about the situation. a crippled nuclear power plant it's stable only in the sense that a kind 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 the situation at the reactor right now it's stable so what do these new developments mean for japanese officials who are hoping to have a disaster contained in the coming months pole dancers the director of the reactor oversight project could be a nuclear he joins me now for welcome thank you tom good to 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 acknowledge it or did they. only found the evidence of what they had to acknowledge the expected or you know what well it i think euphemistically the nuclear industry calls this operator optimism where they keep holding out for hope 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 and

yeah of course you know. 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 for. reactors what is the current status of what's going on as well right now. actually today the tokyo electric power company admitted that all three reactors are in melted down the first three 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 claiming zones are now expanded beyond thirty kilometers in around fukushima what we're actually watching right now is an

evacuation of children and pregnant women beyond thirty kilometers and this is a surefire sign that the permian exclusion zones are going to grow even beyond the twenty kilometers the us government as i recall had recommended fifty kilometers 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 weeks ago this is the concern is that you know we're 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 it was this is a clear violation of human rights but 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 one that have been ignored legal challenges that have been ignored from everything to the construction of 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 that they had set for your twenty twenty has been 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 bloody grieves us that it had come at the cost of so many lives 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 they 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 that this accident is 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 had been dumped into the ocean unintentionally intentionally. getting in the food chain at what point can we expect to see radioactive seafood could the japanese expect to see it and could we expect to see it start to show up in the 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. c we forty miles off the coast of japan is significantly contaminated this is only an indicator that the concentrations of radioactivity in the oceans or 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 rainwater is now being monitored or only every month in the united states so they're actually downgrading the monitoring levels in the united states and the the yearly in the three months absolutely the f.d.a. has made the announcement last week that they're not going to monitor to know and salmon for radioactivity of the pacific amazing absolutely amazing progress or thanks again thanks for the group for doing spreading the word of this disaster is forced to pan to reconsider its future in nuclear power they've reversed their decision to have nuclear account 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 twenty twenty and jumping head first into solar power and energy source from which they leave 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 you said to kick the fossil fuel billionaires and their shills out of politics first. coming up but we have to dig into the funds of hard working americans to save us from total financial disaster. for. five.

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 of the part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry there's a big fish. in the very very conspicuously oddly good high school sophomore any meyers

in new jersey student issued a challenge to congresswoman michele bachmann a tool 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. bachmann accept the challenge 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 to make her more even. a bad georgia republican governor nathan deal so much for the fourth of state journalism georgia after a local news affiliate ran a scathing article about potential ethics violations coming out of the governor's office the governor barred reporters from that affiliate from covering a bill signing ceremony until they apologized for the article and the words

governor deals with this is try to censor news coverage of his administration is he taking a page out of hosni mubarak's playbook or just another republican record. 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 ron did this. 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's 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 of 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 ennio because making sure people are healthy and enslaving them of the same thing i want

a family dinner is like at the poles 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 that's 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 or seen 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 but a fault that most economists say would trigger the next great depression all economists experts most politicians even the chamber of commerce are begging for a clean bill one that only does one thing to raise the debt ceiling arguing that we

can't afford to play games with such high stakes all that's going 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 lost 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 pay it anyways 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 worth of debt in eight years more than any other president in history from george washington to jimmy jimmy carter combined not to mention the vater 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 the republicans really do want us to be for that they want to bring about the next great depression could forever link president obama and the democrats with economic disaster just like what happened herbert hoover is this the sports earth policy the republicans talked about when obama won the presidency and they're doing to destroy the democrats for a generation the way who were destroyed the republicans will 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 it will take no i would 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 denigration 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 of 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 seven even the patron saint of the republican party would have wanted a clean bill to raise the debt ceiling today 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 archie dot com also check out our youtube pages at youtube dot com slash the big picture our t.v. and you tube dot com slash part and this entire show is available as a free video podcast on how to and don't forget the markers he begins with when you get out there and get active tag your it will see the most. wealthy british soil. that's not on the.

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