Why Do People Leave Kids In Hot Cars And What's To Be Done About It?

Most people who leave children in pets in hot cars are not
evil, science suggests. But the brain tricks them into doing
this. There's also prevention ideas out there. 

It's the peak of summer the most dangerous time of year for children and pets left alone in hot cars.

A few people who leave children and pets to die in cars under a hot sun are just evil people.  (I'll get to one of them in a minute.)  

Most of the people who leave kids and Fido in the car, though, are not awful at all, research shows.  Their brains actually conspire to cause trouble.

According to NBC News, if you fall into a routine, and something happens to disrupt that routine, you can forget something that's extremely important to you. Like your child.

It's just the way our brain is structured, Dr. David Diamond, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida told NBC News.

Two competing parts of our brains come into play. There's the basal ganglia, the part that operates on a subconscious level, which allows us to store abilities like ride a bicycle or just generally go on autopilot as we complete routine activities.

Then there's the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain in which we learn new information and complete plans we've made.

Here's how this all relates to leaving kids in hot cars, says Diamond and NBC News:

"'When you drive home and don't normally take a child to daycare, when you have a habit and you are normally driving home from work - and in those subsets or maybe none at all take a child home - well, what happens in all those cases, the parent goes into autopilot mode, which is typically home to work. It's in that subset of cases of basal ganglia is taking you on a route that does not include a child.

In these cases, the child is quiet and out of sight, which causes the parent to lose awareness of the task they're out to do."

In other words, these parents are so used to a routine that when a child changes the routine and needs to be left off at daycare, your autopilot subconscious makes you forget the kid.  The brain has created a false memory in the parent of leaving the child at daycare. When actually the kid is still in the hot car. With tragic results.

To combat this, create another routine that you do on autopilot that forces you to check the whole car before you leave.

Always drop your shoe, briefcase or something important in the back seat so you're forced to check the back seat. Or create a routine to make your subconscious happy in which no matter when you leave the car, you open the back doors to look inside.

Congress is looking into legislation that would create mandatory visual or audio cues to make you check the back seat for kids, pets or anything else that's important.

One great idea came from a ten year old kid.

According to the Huffington Post, Bishop Curry, 10 heard about a neighbor's six month old infant dying in an overheated car, so he is creating a device that would prevent incidents like that.

Curry's device, called the Oasis, would respond to rising temperatures by emitting cool air and would use an antenna to alert parents and/or the authorities.

Curry only has a 3-D model of the Oasis now, but he and his parents are seeking investors to produce the actual device. Good idea!

Of course, studies, useful inventions, regulations and preparedness won't help in those cases where people are just evil or stupid. Or both.

Here's one awful example. The Weather Channel reported on a Florida woman who intentionally left her five year old son in a hot car while she went shopping.

Temperatures in the car reached 110 degrees, but fortunately a passerby noticed the kid and got the police involved in time.

The woman was arrested and as she was being transported in a police cruiser, she complained that it was too hot inside the squad car and demanded police turn up the air conditioning.

Police were not amused. The mom is charged with child neglect and the boy, now recovered, has been placed in the custody of his father.

Sorry, Republican Congress Creatures: NOAA's NOT Fudging Climate Data

NOAA said in 2015 that there was no slow down in global
warming between 1998 and 2014 and used this chart to
illustrate this. A recent study by Berkeley scientists
confirmed NOAA's findings.

The now terribly named U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is ever so annoyed with NOAA climate scientists.

There were some questions about what some saw as a "hiatus" in global warming, largely between 2005 and 2012. 

Climate deniers were pinning their hopes on this supposed hiatus to say the climate change is over, and besides, whatever warming there was didn't happen because of us humans and our fossil fuel use.

Never mind that 2014 turned out to be the hottest year on record. That is until 2015, which beat that record. That is until 2016, which set a new, new record for hottest year.

Still, our climate deniers want ot hang on to any shred of "evidence" they can find to "prove" global warming is a hoax.

Which is what peeved the Republicans on the Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Back in June, 2015, NOAA scientists came up with some research that cast doubt on the warming "hiatus." NOAA researchers increased the estimated rate of global warming in the 15 years prior to 2014.

 NOAA scientists say that more comprehensive data from the oceans and the Arctic showed that warming continued without a break during the late 2000s and early 2010ns.

Deniers quickly pounced on NOAA, claiming the erasing of the "hiatus" was political, that NOAA was trying to convince people of warming that wasn't there.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who chairs the committee said in 2015 "climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades" and NOAA "altered the data to get results they needed to advance this administration's (Obama's) extreme climate change agenda."

The question is there: Did NOAA cook the books to help Obama advance his proposed climate change proposals?

Of course, NOAA's data was public, meaning it was easy to capture for peer review. Scientists LOVE reviewing other people's data. Will there be holes, or is the research solid? That attitude is just part of science,and a healthy part of science at that.

Scientists want to advance knowledge, and besides, debunking science from an outfit like NOAA can't hurt a career. (I'm being cynical here.)

So scientists at the University of Berkeley,  California went ot work, and reviewed climate data obtained separately from NOAA.

The Berkeley scientists  concluded --- wait for it --- that the NOAA research was accurate. "They weren't cooking the books," said Zeke Hausfather, the Berkeley study's lead author.

Yep, it turned out the Earth was cooking, but NOAA's books were not.

To determine whether NOAA knew what it was doing, and whether they were faking data, which critics had contended, the Berkeley researchers went through independent data with a fine-toothed comb .

The researchers examined satellite data, readings from floating buoys and information from devices that sink into the oceans to record temperatures, salinity and other factors.

The Berkeley analysts said their conclusions agreed almost perfectly with the NOAA data.

It turns out the "hiatus" in warming in the years surrounding 2010 was the false stuff: It turns out the data that suggested the hiatus was faulty.

Better data showed the warming continued apace.

Of course, then came 2014 through 2016, which turned out to be the warmest years on record.

Most scientists think 2017, on a global basis, will still be much warmer than normal, but a tad cooler than the record breaking levels of 2016.

I guess that will bring us to the next, familiar step from the climate deniers: If 2017 ends up being a bit chillier than toasty 2016, the deniers will tell us that climate change is over, or never happened.

I'm sure we'll hear that any minute. If we haven't already.

With Republicans in charge, and the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology will continue to claim that fighting global warming is futile, because it doesn't exist and would be expensive.

I guess facts are whatever you want to believe, in the U.S. Congress, and if reality intrudes, pretend it doesn't exist.

Sigh.

Extreme Weather Worsens Poverty, Says Study, Which States The Obvious

It's fairly quiet in the weather department here in Vermont this week. A couple of cold fronts are coming in, promising some soaking rains tonight and maybe Thursday night, too.

In this image from Oxfam, drought hits
a region of Africa. A study says extreme weather
keeps millions in poverty.  

It will also turn notably cooler by the weekend.

Still, we're not expecting any extremes, nothing out of the ordinary for October.

With no extremes here, we look to the news and find a study that seems to state the obvious. In vulnerable countries, extreme weather worsens poverty, and makes it more difficult to fight your way out of poverty.

The most interesting part of the study, according to the BBC, is that extreme weather might be the biggest factor in maintaining poverty, more than social patterns, bad health, poor education, political problems or bad infrastructure.

Of course, this is a problem, since weather extremes are getting well, more extreme, due to global climate change.

The study says money usually flows in response to weather disasters such as drought and extreme floods in vulnerable countries. Maybe the money should flow toward preventing disasters, or at least bolstering the region's resiliance against weather extremes.

Unfortunately, death seems to make the money flow. Just last weekend, a massive cyclone caused major damage in a poor region of India. The nation did exactly the right thing in evacuating hundreds of thousands of people from the cyclone's target, and that saved countless lives.

(In 1999, a similar cyclone hit that part of India. The government didn't evacuate people, and about 10,000 died)

But since not that many people died, there might be less relief money going to the hard hit region of India, which would ensure people remain mired in poverty.

It seems that old Boy Scout adage works in everything: Be prepared.

New Study Backs Others: Growing Season Lengthening In The United States

It's well into October and the rose bush in front of my house has suddenly decided to put out a whole bunch of beautiful blooms.

A rose blooms in my St. Albans garden last weekend.
The growing season is lengthening allowing spectacles
like this October bloom.  

Foliage season in Vermont this year has been augmented by lush green grass in the fields, flowering gardens, and people still happily harvesting vegetables from their  back yards.

While much of Vermont has had some frost this autumn, some areas, particularly the Champlain Valley, hasn't had a freeze yet.

That's in keeping with a new federal Environmental Protection Agency study that says the growing season in the United States has, on average, lengthened by about two weeks in the past century.

That's one more piece of evidence that the planet is warming.

Another study released last winter from Plos One said flowers are blooming earlier and earlier in the spring.

For some reason, the growing season in the West is getting longer faster. There, its gone up by 22 days in the past century. Here in the East, we get about eight extra days of gardening per year.

The median date for a first freeze of the season in Burlington is October 7. This year, Burlington hasn't had a freeze yet, and none is in the forecast for the next few days.

The studies that show a longer growing season doesn't mean we won't have occasional late frosts in the spring or early frosts in the fall. It just means the trend line is we get to enjoy our gardens for longer periods of time each  year.

A couple spectacular blooms on my rose bush are fading after putting on a show this past weekend. But two more blooms are ready to pop. It's supposed to be mild over the next couple of days, so my roses will give me more late season joy it looks like.

Bottom line: Global warming is bad, but there are a few silver linings that come with it. Or in my case, white roses.