Climate change has raised the temprerature of the Atlantic Ocean 5 degrees. Here's how much more energy that meant was in just the first 1" of water under these hurricanes.

The day after hurricane Sandy hit the eastern United States, to devastating effect, a political debate is raging over whether Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney suggested last year the elimination of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

The Romney campaign maintains he did nothing of the kind in the Republican primary debate held on June 13, 2011. Democrats – and the editorial page of The New York Times – insist(s) he did.

Let’s look at the transcript.
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KING: What else, Governor Romney? You've been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I've been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it's the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we're learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. [font size="+1"]And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better.[/font]

...it was significant to see 80 CEOs of major American companies sign a letter this past week committing to press for a balanced bipartisan plan to reduce the deficit and debt no matter which candidate is elected president on November 6.

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The CEOs in question include prominent Romney donors like AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, whose company gave a $4 million donation to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's conservative 501-C6 organization, which has already put more than $15 million into this election.

What's surprising is that the CEOs' commitment to a balanced bipartisan plan puts them much closer to Obama's deficit reduction plan than to Mitt Romney's.

That's because it also dovetails with the outlines of the Grand Bargain negotiated by Obama and House Speaker John Boehner in the summer of 2011, only to have negotiations fall apart.

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The reason the fiscal cliff is such a threat to 2013′s economy isn’t that it’s too little deficit reduction — it’s that it’s too much all at once, totaling about $720 billion, or 5.1 percent of GDP in a single year, which could throw the economy into recession.

Republicans agree on that. Democrats agree on that. And in agreeing on that, both sides appear to be embracing an argument that’s been rather contentious in recent years: that fiscal stimulus boosts short-term economic growth and budget cuts hurt it.


“The fact that going over the fiscal cliff would hurt the economy in the short run is, to me, basically saying stimulus would help the economy in the short run,” says Brookings economist William Gale. “The whole debate over whether the stimulus is a good idea is answered by those who say going over the fiscal cliff is a bad idea.”

Gale is among the cliff-divers who are pushing for policymakers to go over to force Republicans to accept more revenue. But he only wants to do so if Congress also passes a temporary stimulus measure to boost the economy in the short term — some combination of ”payroll tax cuts, infrastructure investment and aid to the states … [that] would have a bigger ‘bang for the buck’ than extending the Bush tax cuts.”

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Mitt Romney, interestingly, is an exception to this rule: He’s not offering huge tax cuts. Or, to be more precise, he is offering huge tax cuts but he’s promising to pay for them by closing tax breaks and ending deductions. That is to say, he’s at least admitting that tax cuts cost money and need to be paid for. Given that his various numbers don’t add up, there’s a bit of pixie dust there, but it is, rhetorically at least, a turn away from voodoo and towards responsibility.

More worrying is what we might call Romney’s voodoo spending cuts: His promise that his promised spending cuts, despite being deeper than any in modern history, won’t hurt anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason. In fact – shades of supply-side economics here — they’ll probably make government services even better.

[font size="+1"]Let’s start with the promises. Romney says he’ll cut federal spending to less than 20 percent of GDP by 2016, and he’ll do it without making cuts to Social Security or Medicare and while increasing spending on defense. To make that work, Romney will have to cut every other program in the federal budget – education, infrastructure, food safety, R&D, tax collections, FEMA, Medicaid, food stamps, national parks, etc – by 40 percent.[/font]

Those are massive, devastating cuts. But when you ask Romney to get specific, he talks about PBS and arts funding, as he did during the debates. And when Romney is left to his own devices, he doesn’t admit the reality of cutting federal spending at all. He hides all of it in vague plans to hand control over to the states.

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GM developed a production-ready magnesium rear deck lid inner panel that withstood 77,000 robotic slams and 250-kilogram impact drops without any issues.


On the heels of announcing an industry-first welding technology for aluminum, GM Research and Development is revealing a patented new process for adding magnesium sheet metal to vehicles. The use of magnesium, which weighs 33 percent less than aluminum, 60 percent less than titanium, and 75 percent less than steel, will help customers save money at the gas pump.

Until now, automakers have struggled to make reliably strong and non-corroding magnesium sheet metal panels using traditional panel forming methods. GM’s patented process turns up the heat on magnesium to 450 degrees Celsius (842 degrees Fahrenheit), allowing the material to be molded into precise, rigid shapes. Using this process, GM developed a production-ready magnesium rear deck lid inner panel that could remove 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of weight from a vehicle compared with an aluminum deck lid inner panel.

“Every gram of weight reduction matters when it comes to improving fuel economy,” said Greg Warden, GM executive director for global vehicle body engineering. “Being able to replace heavier metals with one of the lightest will help us deliver better fuel economy to customers around the world while also still providing the safety and durability they expect.”

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The United States Automotive Materials Partnership estimates that by 2020, 350 pounds of magnesium will replace 500 pounds of steel and 130 pounds of aluminum per vehicle, an overall weight reduction of 15 percent. This weight savings would lead to a fuel savings of 9 percent to 12 percent.

Mitt Romney’s final attempt to swing Ohio polls in his direction is a bit too much for a number of political reporters, and is now facing an aggressive response from the Obama campaign.

In news articles, tweets, and other media, members of the national press, usually reluctant to criticize campaigns directly, have taken Romney to task for running a misleading TV ad creating the false impression that Jeep will ship jobs to China because of President Obama’s auto rescue.


“Mitt Romney’s campaign has released an ad in Ohio that says he — and not President Barack Obama — will do more to help the auto industry, even though Obama’s administration is widely credited with helping to turn around General Motors and Chrysler when they faced collapse,” writes the Detroit Free Press in an article titled ‘Romney takes heat for new ad on jobs, auto rescue’. “In the ad, the Romney campaign also says that Jeep, now owned by Italian automaker Fiat after going through a structured bankruptcy in 2009, is going to make cars in China. While true, that production would represent an expansion or return of jobs to China for Chrysler, not a transfer of North American jobs. It also is a move that analysts say could improve the brand’s global standing.”

“Romney Ad Wrongly Implies Chrysler Is Sending U.S. Jobs To China,” reads a National Journal headline.
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