Abortion pill rulings undermine religious freedom, interfaith leaders say

Multiple faith groups object to Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s ruling on mifepristone, saying it is motivated by a sectarian version of Christianity that tramples over their beliefs.

People march in front of the J. Marvin Jones Federal Building and Mary Lou Robinson United States Courthouse to protest a lawsuit to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, Feb. 11, 2023, in Amarillo, Texas. (AP Photo/Justin Rex)

April 14, 2023
By Yonat Shimron

(RNS) — Beginning Saturday, abortion rights groups are assembling a series of rallies and protests in defense of mifepristone, an abortion pill a federal judge in Texas sought to suspend.

Leading the charge are notable religious coalitions of Jews, Catholics and Hindus, as well as many ecumenical Christians.

These faith groups insist that Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s ruling last week — like the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson last year — is motivated by a sectarian version of Christianity that tramples over their beliefs that abortion is religiously permitted.

“The idea that a court would determine when life begins reflects a narrow view of one religion and imposes Christian nationalism on all of us,” said Shannon Russell, policy director for Catholics for Choice, an abortion-rights advocacy group that dissents from the Catholic Church’s official position on abortion.

Catholics for Choice members will be among those rallying in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., Saturday, as well as in cities across the nation, as part of a weekend of action around abortion rights.

Most immediately, these religious groups are protesting Kacsmaryk’s ruling, which invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone more than 20 years ago. On Friday (April 14), the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily restored full access to the abortion medication and may review the case before its summer recess. (A federal appeals panel earlier this week limited the distribution and access to the abortion pill.)

U.S. Catholic Bishops in a written statement said they hoped for a final resolution that “will result in removal of chemical abortion from the market altogether.” The Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics arm also hailed Kacsmaryk’s ruling.

RELATED: Poll: Support for abortion rights is strong, even among most religious groups

“As Christians, our advocacy must continue until every preborn life is safe from annihilation and every mother is protected from a predatory abortion industry,” Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said in a statement.

Twenty-one states have had abortion restrictions or bans introduced in their legislatures this year in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. Twenty states have passed protections for abortion.

FILE – Boxes of the drug mifepristone sit on a shelf at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on March 16, 2022. Danco Laboratories is asking the Supreme Court to preserve access to its abortion pill free from restrictions imposed by lower court rulings, while a legal fight continues. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed, File)

Still, nearly two-thirds of all Americans (64%) believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute.

Religious groups advocating for abortion rights point out that though they may not represent the majority of Christian evangelicals, they do represent the majority of Americans.

“This idea that to be a person of faith means you’re anti-abortion is a narrative constructed for political gain,” said the Rev. Katey Zeh, CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. “It’s something we have to challenge. It’s not going to end here.”

These groups are pushing back against the prevailing view that abortion is religiously forbidden. Judaism, for example, does not believe the fetus is considered a person with full human rights until it is born. Other people of faith also interpret their sacred teachings differently.

Not only are the plaintiffs in the abortion pill case Christian — the case was filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal advocacy group — so is the judge.

Abortion rights groups pointed out that the language in Kacsmaryk’s ruling is infused with tropes used by anti-abortion Christians. Instead of using the more neutral and scientific terms “embryo,” or “fetus,” the ruling uses “unborn children” and “unborn humans.” It refers to abortion providers as “abortionists,” and to the medication as “chemical abortion.”

Kacsmaryk recently served as a board member of Christian Homes and Family Services, which provides housing for unwed pregnant women, The Washington Post reported.

He also worked for the First Liberty Institute, a conservative Christian legal activist group, before former President Donald Trump appointed him to the bench in 2019. While at the Liberty Institute, Kacsmaryk wrote critically about Roe v. Wade.

“This is part of a much larger political agenda to dismantle our democracy in the name of Christianity,” Zeh said.

On Monday, interfaith groups for abortion rights will be in Tallahassee, Florida, to protest a new law that bans abortion after six weeks. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the legislation on Thursday.

U.S. Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C., was on the National Council of Jewish Women’s webinar this week urging the group to continue its work.

“This is an extremist view of when life begins that is not part of our particular religion,” said Manning, who is Jewish. “So I think it’s important for us to advocate because we’re good at it and because it’s part of our values.”

SATANIC TEMPLE ADVOCATES FOR THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE 

American billionaires almost a third richer today than when pandemic hit: report

EVEN AFTER LOSING BILLIONS

Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams
April 15, 2023

As the deadline for Americans to file federal income tax returns fast approaches, Oxfam America on Friday renewed calls for taxing the ultrarich while publishing an analysis showing America's growing number of billionaires saw their wealth increase by nearly one-third since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and by nearly 90% over the past decade.

"Wealth inequality in the U.S. is more extreme and dangerous than income inequality; and we need to change our approach, so we effectively tax wealth as well as income," the charity said in an introduction to the report, Tax Wealth, Tackle Inequality.

Based on Forbes data, the report found that "U.S. billionaires are almost a third richer (over a trillion dollars, in real terms) than they were at the onset of the pandemic in 2020," while overall U.S. billionaire wealth has soared 86% since 2013.

The number of U.S. billionaires—of which there are now more than 700—is also nearly 60% higher than it was a decade ago, according to the analysis.

As the report notes:
At the same time, our country has a "permanent underclass" of working families who are denied their economic rights, trapped in poverty, and unable to accumulate wealth no matter how hard they work. Oxfam data shows that almost a third of the U.S. labor force earns less than $15 an hour; half of all working women of color earn less than $15.14. The racial wealth gap is actually growing wider since the 1980s, and today is close to what it was in 1950. The average Black American household currently has only about 12 cents in wealth for every dollar of the average white American household.
And while the gender pay gap has barely budged in two decades, the gender wealth gap is much wider. One study found a raw gender wealth gap of women owning 32 cents for every dollar of male wealth. For women of color, the gap is even more profound.


"At a time when the ultrawealthy are amassing historic and dangerous levels of wealth, a federal wealth tax offers a vital and necessary tool for directly redressing extreme wealth inequality, as well as advancing racial justice, tackling the climate crisis, and protecting democracy," Oxfam argued. "It also offers a reminder that today's debt ceiling gridlock is a consequence of giving tax breaks to the ultrawealthy."

\u201cJeff Bezos is worth $122 BILLION, while a market trader selling rice in Uganda makes $80 monthly.\n\nGuess which one is taxed at 40%?\n\nJoin the global call to tax the mega-rich now.\n#TaxBillionaires\n\nhttps://t.co/DtdocnOHik\u201d

— Mark Ruffalo (@Mark Ruffalo) 1681425400

Oxfam urges Congress and the Biden administration to enact legislation like Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which would impose a 2% annual tax on the net worth of households and trusts exceeding $50 million, plus a 1% annual surtax on billionaires.

According to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the tax would bring in at least $3 trillion in revenue over 10 years without raising taxes on 99.95% of American households worth less than $50 million.

Citing figures from the Institute for Policy Studies and Patriotic Millionaires, Oxfam's analysis showed that:

The wealth tax proposed by Sen. Warren, based on taxing U.S. billionaires alone, would raise $114 billion annually—more than enough to pay for reinstating the Child Tax Credit;

An annual net wealth tax could raise over half a trillion dollars ($582.6 billion) each year, by taxing more than only billionaires and using marginally higher rates: 2% for wealth above $5 million, 3% above $50 million, and 5% above $1 billion; and
If there had been a net wealth tax of 6.9% since 2013, it would have kept billionaire wealth simply constant.

"Tax Day is a reminder that the tax system isn't working for ordinary Americans. It's built to favor the richest in our society," said Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America's director of economic justice. "The ultrawealthy are sitting on mountains of wealth that remain largely untouched by taxes, and their wild riches are in no small part a result of intentional public policy."

"We need to implement strategic wealth taxes if we want to stand any chance at reining in this kind of Gilded-Era wealth inequality that allows the super-rich to have a stranglehold over our economy," Ahmed continued.

"Taxing the ultrawealthy is essential to tackle extreme wealth inequality and protect our democracy from the threat of oligarchy—but it is also central to advancing racial and climate justice, connections that we must pay more attention to," he added. "It's also clear that political gridlock around the debt ceiling is a consequence of tax cuts on the richest."

Robert Reich: Will Fox News be detoxed?

Robert Reich, AlterNet
April 14, 2023

CEO and founder of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch 

The $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — which starts Monday, with jury selection tomorrow — has uncovered a trove of damning text messages and emails showing that Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham knowingly lied to their viewers about false claims of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

A few weeks ago, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled that the evidence made it “CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” and that the statements from Fox News that are challenged by Dominion constitute defamation “per se.”

Yesterday, Judge Davis said he was imposing a sanction on Fox News and would very likely start an investigation into whether Fox’s legal team had deliberately withheld evidence, scolding the lawyers for not being “straightforward” with him. The rebuke came after lawyers for Dominion revealed a number of instances in which Fox’s lawyers had not turned over evidence in a timely manner. The judge also said he would likely appoint a special master to investigate Fox’s handling of discovery of documents and the question of whether Fox had inappropriately withheld details about Rupert Murdoch’s role as a corporate officer of Fox News.

Doesn’t look good for Fox.

But one key group of people haven’t heard the revelations about Fox News: Fox News viewers. There’s been a near-total blackout of the story on Fox News, and Fox host Howard Kurtz has confirmed that Fox higher-ups have issued orders to ignore the story. Fox has even rejected paid ads that would have alerted viewers about the lawsuit. Other Rupert Murdoch-owned properties, like the New York Post, are also keeping their readers in the dark. Fox News has even filed a motion arguing that the court should maintain the confidentiality of discovery material already redacted by the network, shielding it from the public.

So today’s Office Hours question: If the court finds that Fox News defamed Dominion, will Fox viewers ever know the network knowingly lied to them about the 2020 presidential election? And will the judgment force Fox News (and other news media) to change the way they cover the news in the future?

What do you think?

My two cents:

IMHO, most of you nailed it. As long as there’s big money to be made by selling lies, weaponizing Trump viciousness, and peddling conspiracy theories, Fox News will continue to do it. The network will appeal any verdict that goes against it, and even if it ultimately loses on the law it will negotiate damages lower than $1.6 billion — and quickly make it up in future revenue. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t give a fig about the public interest or even the opinion of most of the public as long as he can continue to inject profitable toxins into the brains of his viewers (and readers). And he has rounded up sufficiently venal and unprincipled hosts — Tucker Carlson et al — who will also sell dangerous lies as long as they make big bucks doing so.

Advertisers don’t care, either, as long as Fox News viewers continue to watch the network’s appalling content.

I very much like Marilyn Anderson’s idea that, if Dominion wins the lawsuit, part of any settlement should specify that Fox News makes a statement of transparency about the litigation they lost and why.

But the basic question here is whether lawmakers are willing — and courts are willing to let them — impose any special responsibilities on cable networks, as they did with the old “fairness doctrine” as once applied to broadcasters who utilized the public spectrum. I doubt it.

Wish I could be more optimistic about this, but profiting off of dangerous lies has become a big business in America. This is one of the core challenges to the future of democracy.

The rightwing movement is weaponizing victimhood to create a parallel economy

The Conversation
April 14, 2023

A man hiding money in his suit (Shutterstock.com)

The last few years have seen the west swept by political polarisation, much of which has played out online. Debates around race, gender and freedom of speech have splintered democracies, spread conspiracy theories and sparked a series of culture wars. One byproduct of this is a rightwing movement in the tech and economic spaces, known as the “parallel economy”.

The parallel economy is a system of financial services, e-commerce websites and social media targeting communities with rightwing political values, mainly in the US and Europe. Boasting taglines like “America’s first credit card for Conservatives” and “Save America, stop funding woke corporations”, these services aim to circumvent or compete with mainstream financial institutions and tech.

Historically, the term parallel economy has been used alongside concepts like the “shadow” or “underground” economy, referring to an unsanctioned economic sector operating outside of official channels and eluding GDP estimates.

But now, both in the US and Europe, the term has become a catchall to describe a resistance movement against what some sections of the political right view as the “woke” economy. In other words, business and financial systems that prioritise progressive social causes and are often associated with the political left.

In our research into the parallel economy platforms BitChute and Gab, we found that users of these platforms feel a duty and responsibility to expose the “uncensored truth”. They see themselves as a counter-voice to mainstream sites, working to ensure free and unrestricted speech.

Advocates for the parallel economy view mainstream media and tech firms as oppressors of conservative voices. In response, they are creating and supporting alternative platforms that align with their conservative values. These include e-commerce, social media, credit cards and even dating apps.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to the US. The video platform BitChute was founded in the UK, and other examples have emerged in Ireland, Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere.

Financial preppers (people who take proactive measures to prepare for financial crises), small business owners and other internet entrepreneurs have joined the movement to promote their own products and services. While it is difficult to measure the full reach of the parallel economy, data suggests that alternative social media alone is attracting tens of millions of users.

Deplatformed and demonetised

The parallel economy provides a perceived “safe haven” and offers new monetisation opportunities for content creators who have felt silenced – or been sanctioned – on mainstream platforms.

Like all content creators, conservative influencers rely on social media to remain relevant, influential and profitable. This can be through subscription revenue, viewer donations, ads or selling merchandise.

Some platforms, such as YouTube, provide a formal infrastructure to help creators monetise. The YouTube Partner Programme has been a vital revenue source for content creators, including some conspiracy theorists and extremists.

Under intense pressure from regulators and advertisers, YouTube has begun demonetising problematic videos. This means banning users from the ad revenue sharing programme altogether, although demonetised creators and their content may still be visible to users. Some platforms, including YouTube, have also stepped up efforts to remove content creators entirely for violating rules around sexual content, harassment or misinformation.

This is where “alt-tech” platforms come in. Self-proclaimed free speech advocates have launched a number of alternative platforms, providing refuge to the deplatformed. If someone is banned from YouTube, they can now turn to Rumble or BitChute.

Rumble, a Canadian company, has become home to numerous “mega influencers” considered controversial or who have been deplatformed by major social media platforms. These include former US president Donald Trump and misogyny influencer Andrew Tate.

American Conservative commentator Stew Peters used Rumble to release his viral COVID-19 “documentary” Died Suddenly. The hour-long video, which has nearly 18 million views, links unexpected deaths to vaccinations and promotes a number of debunked conspiracy theories.

Making money in the parallel economy

As alt-tech platforms grow in popularity, established technology companies have increasingly denied them access to their services (app stores, payment processors). This is a process known as “deplatformisation”. PayPal has deplatformed several conservative alt-tech platforms including Gab, known as the free speech Twitter alternative. In response, Gab launched its own payment processor, GabPay, to enable financial transactions with and between users.

Platforms such as BitChute and Gab encourage users to support their content creators through donations or tipping. Rumble has also acquired Locals, an online service that allows creators to generate subscription-based income.

Content creators and users can also promote and sell products, such as health supplements and alternative medicine, on many alt-tech platforms. Gab has established an in-platform marketplace for this purpose. These opportunities provide content creators with a source of income, while also allowing users to support the creators and products they believe in, outside of mainstream corporate influence.

American conservative political commentator Jeremy Boreing is a vocal advocate for the parallel economy. As the co-founder of Conservative news website The Daily Wire, Boreing encouraged his readers to spend money not just on his online media, but on “anti-woke” shaving products and chocolate.

The parallel economy capitalises on a sense of ideological victimhood that many on the political right are feeling. This message is at the heart of Boreing’s plea to readers: “Stop giving your money to corporations that hate you.”

Jing Zeng, Assistant Professor of Digital Methods and Critical Data Studies, Utrecht University and Daniela Mahl, PhD student at the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cyclone Ilsa just broke an Australian wind speed record. An expert explains why the science behind this is so complex

The Conversation
April 15, 2023

An anemometer. Wattanasit Chunopas/Shutterstock

Tropical cyclone Ilsa has been downgraded to a category-three cyclone as it moves southeast through Western Australia. The storm first made landfall as a category-five cyclone, passing near Port Hedland around midnight.

Ilsa smashed into the largely uninhabited Pilbara region (the country’s most cyclone-prone region) at record-breaking speeds. It has delivered Australia’s highest ten-minute sustained wind speed record at landfall: about 218 kilometers per hour. The previous record of 194km per hour came from tropical cyclone George in 2007.

So, does this new speed make Ilsa a particularly menacing disaster? The science of reporting on cyclone wind speeds is highly complex – and it can be easy to misconstrue the figures without some context.

Record-breaking sustained wind speeds

As Ilsa continues to move inland, it looks likely the storm will be further downgraded before it passes into the Northern Territory – and potentially over Alice Springs – later today and tomorrow.

Ilsa made landfall about 100km north of Port Hedland, which hosts the world’s largest export site for iron ore. But a red alert prompted most vessels to be moved farther west in advance, so it only caused minor destruction.


This Bureau of Meteorology satellite image shows Ilsa at 10:30am AEST, on Thursday. BoM

Analysis by James Knight at Aon’s Reinsurance Solutions expects in general it will cause only minor damage due to the remoteness of where it has hit.

Apart from the ten-minute sustained record mentioned above, Ilsa had a one-minute sustained record of 240km per hour, and a three-second sustained record of 295km per hour.

It’s usually the latter, more intense gusts, that cause the most damage in tropical cyclone events. When it comes to making potential damage assessment for insurance purposes, firms will often model damage associated with a three-second sustained wind speed.

But there are several challenges that come with recording and making predictions about cyclone wind speeds.

How are tropical cyclone winds recorded?

The Bureau of Meteorology maintains a national wind recording database, which uses instruments called anemometers. These measure wind speeds at locations across the country, and are often placed in flat areas, such as near airports.

Their specific placement is very important, because wind can change form as it moves over and through certain types of terrain.

Generally, when we report wind speed we’re referring to atmospheric wind gust, or wind speeds at least ten meters off the ground, which we also call “open terrain” wind speed.


However, wind passing closer to the ground, where the topography varies, will often be higher than winds passing directly above. Wind will speed up, for instance, if it’s squeezed between two hills.

We know from post-cyclone damage surveys that wind speeds can vary significantly from one side of a hill to another. So aspect and slope are very important.

As far as disaster modeling goes, this is no small issue as it can skew recordings. It’s quite possible there would have been wind gusts from Ilsa that exceeded what has been reported so far.

Australia lacks a sufficiently dense network of anemometers set up for long-term testing. If we want to gain insight into the frequency and intensity of extreme cyclone wind speeds over time, we’ll need a national quality-controlled network that has better spatial coverage.

The equipment we have, although it’s designed to withstand extreme conditions, can get knocked around and thrown offline – introducing data gaps in the time series.

Accurate and consistent data points are crucial if we want to record and predict the kinds of extreme winds we might experience during future tropical cyclones. And while the efforts of independent storm chasers and university groups do go some way, taking measurements from different sources can introduce a lot of uncertainty in the overall process.

Cyclone intensity will increase

Since 1975, there have been 48 category-five tropical cyclones to hit Australia – an average of about one per year. Shile Ilsa sets a new record for the strongest sustained wind gust at landfall, category-five tropical cyclones have been occurring with some regularity overall.

It’s worth mentioning Ilsa formed pretty late in the cyclone season. Although the Bureau of Meteorology says cyclones can form any time of the year, its very rare for this to happen outside of April.

Historical trends and climate change projections suggest the number of landfalling cyclones in our region will decrease over time. This has been consistent with real-world data, and puts Australia at odds with other regions of the world, where cyclone frequency is increasing.

However, most climate models also predict a greater proportion of these cyclones will be of a higher strength. The current scientific consensus is we’ll experience these events less often, but when we do, they will be more intense.

Thomas Mortlock, Adjunct Fellow, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Unsound climate studies sneak into print: scientists

Agence France-Presse
April 14, 2023

The Palcaraju mountain in Huaraz, Peru, is at the heart of a climate lawsuit in Germany 

© Luka GONZALES / AF


Misleading studies sowing doubt about climate change are getting into peer-reviewed journals, scientists warn, citing recent papers linked to a lawsuit in Germany whose authors denied conflicts of interest.

Observers have long questioned the growing number of research journals that take fees from eager academics but often publish their work without rigorous review.

Biased authors, they say, are taking advantage of an overloaded assessment system, undermining the scientific evidence that provides the bedrock for climate action.

"The recent explosion of so-called 'predatory journals' is creating problems that are pro-actively explored by climate skeptics," said Carl Schleussner, a scientist at research group Climate Analytics.

"It opens the door to those who want to willingly get dubious research out there."

Peruvian glacier study

One study denied that human-driven warming was to blame for the melting of a Peruvian glacier and consequent flood risk.

Two of its authors are former executives of RWE, a German energy company targeted by a lawsuit over the glacier, and both are prominent climate contrarians.

Their study appeared in November 2022 in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences, which is owned by the major Dutch publisher Elsevier.

Like many others, the journal charges authors for submissions, which are then supposed to be vetted by qualified experts before being published.

The paper attacked the findings of an earlier study by scientists at Oxford University that a plaintiff in the Peruvian case -- a local farmer who says RWE's carbon emissions contributed to warming -- is citing as evidence.

Nathan Stansell, a palaeoclimatologist at Northern Illinois University, is one of the scientists whose work was cited in the German-led paper.

The paper was "fraught with misinformation, mischaracterizations and bias," he told AFP.

It presented a "debunked argument that since it was warm in medieval times, then there was nothing alarming about recent warming.

"The bulk of the paleoclimate community recognizes that the groups trying to spread this fallacy cannot compete with sound scientific data."

Two other scientists cited in the study, Ben Marzeion of the University of Bremen and Jorge Strelin of Cordoba University in Argentina, also told AFP their work was misused.

Strelin said a graphic in the study, drawing on one used in his own work, omitted data showing the sharp retreat of one glacier over recent decades.

The two ex-RWE men, lead author and geologist Sebastian Luening and chemist-turned-politician Fritz Vahrenholt, did not respond to AFP's requests to comment.

The author of the Oxford study, Rupert Stuart-Smith, submitted to the journal a formal scientific rebuttal of Luening's paper, contesting its use of certain data and detailing what he called "inaccurate or misleading assertions."

Elsevier communications executive Andrew Davis told AFP the journal's editors "did not detect unethical behaviors and it is their belief that the two research groups simply did not agree with each other."

But the publisher acknowledged the failure to include a disclosure of the authors' links to RWE in the study.

The disclosure did appear in a preliminary "pre-proof" of the paper but disappeared from the version published in November 2022.


"The publisher would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused," Elsevier said in an email to AFP.

It said the disclosure would be added back into the study after approval from the authors.
Firm denies funding study

Another paper on the Peru glacier appeared in the journal Remote Sensing, from publisher MDPI, in 2021.

The study reviewed three years of data on ice-flow velocity and assessed the risk of avalanches and floods, concluding that there was no evidence that a flood was imminent.

Stansell said this conclusion should have been dealt with in a separate study as it "seems out of place and doesn't relate directly with their principal findings".

A 2022 article by investigative media group SourceMaterial said the study was produced with funding from RWE. It cited the authors as denying this. The authors did not respond to AFP.

RWE spokesman Guido Steffen told AFP the study "was made independently from RWE and the court case and it was not funded or paid for by RWE."

Regarding the Luening study, he said: "We did neither commission that study nor play any role in producing it."

Extreme weather study slammed

In September 2022, top climate scientists called for the withdrawal of a paper that claimed scientific evidence of a climate crisis was lacking.

The peer-reviewed paper by four Italian scientists appeared in the European Physical Journal Plus, from prestigious science publisher Springer Nature.

Four scientists told AFP the study manipulated data and cherry-picked facts about extreme weather events.

In response, Springer Nature put a warning notice on the article and said it was investigating.

In late March 2023 Christian Caron, executive publisher of Springer Nature, told AFP the investigation was "progressing but still ongoing.

"Additional material received as part of the investigation is currently following the usual procedures of an extensive peer-reviewing process, which may take more time than anticipated."

Payment for publication is a time-honored part of the business model among peer-reviewed journals.

Their reputation relies on being the gold standard in scientific publishing, through external reviewers who are supposed to weed out false papers and reject sketchy or biased use of data.

But the low-cost advantages of publishing on the internet have led to an explosion of peer-reviewed journals and, say some, standards have fallen.

Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks thousands of withdrawals of academic papers each year, told AFP some authors sought to get unsound work published in journals with a lax peer-review system that used unqualified reviewers.

"A lot of junk gets through peer review," he said. "It is really time that everybody admitted that, so that we can try and do better."

© 2023 AFP

Marjorie Taylor Greene stuns experts with scientifically illiterate rant on climate change

Brad Reed

RAW STORY
April 15, 2023

Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks during a court hearing on April 22, 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia.

 (Photo by John Bazemore-Pool/Getty Images)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Saturday posted a scientifically illiterate tweet about climate change that left many of her followers stunned.

In trying to play down the threat posed by a warming planet, Greene wrote a lengthy, nonsensical post that did not even attempt to discuss the actual science behind climate change.

"If you believe that today’s 'climate change' is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled," she wrote. "We live on a spinning planet that rotates around a much bigger sun along with other planets and heavenly bodies rotating around the sun that all create gravitational pull on one another while our galaxy rotates and travels through the universe. Considering all of that, yes our climate will change, and it’s totally normal!"

In fact, scientists have found that the Earth's climate was relatively stable for thousands of years until the end of the 20th Century, when human activity pumped increased the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere, which caused global temperatures to spike.

Greene is correct, however, that the Earth does revolve around the sun, which means she likely does not subscribe to the "flat Earth" conspiracy theory.

Many of Greene's followers jumped in to mock her for completely bungling the science behind climate change.

Brant Beckman, a meteorologist at South Dakota-based news station KNBN, attacked Greene for displaying a graph in her post that purportedly debunked climate change despite the fact that it had absolutely nothing to do with the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere.

"If you tried to present this graph in a basic statistics course, the teacher would have thrown a chair at the chalkboard," he wrote. "These are nonsense words. Like pretending you speak German by mumbling strange words together."

WAOW meteorologist also took note that Greene's graph did not include anything about carbon dioxide emissions, so he replied to her tweet showing her a graph showing the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere over time.

Ryan Matoush, a meteorologist at KNST News Topeka, was similarly floored by Greene's total ineptitude at grasping basic scientific concepts.

"It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that someone like this holds a position of power and responsibility - where did we go so wrong??" he asked.

NASA climate scientist Chris Colose sarcastically thanked Greene for debunking his entire work by spouting utter nonsense.

"Good news climate Twitter! We forgot that the Earth spins and revolves so it’s time to pack up and go home," he joked.

'What a mess': Texas Republicans flattened by the WSJ for botching new 'energy fiasco' fix
Tom Boggioni
April 15, 2023

Oil Wells (Shuttershock)

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal pounded the Republican-controlled Texas Senate for a new proposal to avoid another disaster like the February 2021 freeze that left an estimated 10 million without power and officials scrambling as the death toll mounted.

Getting right to the point, the editorial board began their piece with "What a mess" before delving into the new proposal that will cost Texas taxpayers billions for subsidies with no guarantee the problems have been fixed.

According to the editors, "Renewable subsidies have distorted and destabilized the Texas electric grid, which resulted in a week-long power outage during the February 2021 freeze. To prevent more blackouts, Republicans in the Lone Star State now plan to subsidize gas power plants."

They then added, "The Texas Senate last week passed putative energy reforms to 'level the playing field,' as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick put it. Texans will now spend tens of billions of dollars to bolster natural-gas plants that provide reliable power but can’t make money because of competition from subsidized renewable energy."

Explaining, "Baseload plants were developed on the financial assumption that they’d run 85% to 90% of the time, but many aren’t because they are being squeezed by renewables. Coal plants are closing, and gas generators are at risk. Too few new gas plants are being built to support a growing population and industry. As a result, power is becoming unreliable, especially during extreme weather."

Noting, "Another Senate bill would create financial incentives for “peaker” gas plants that could ramp up on demand. Yet building peaker gas plants that run only 10% of the time costs about three times more than a baseload gas plant that operates 85% to 90% of the time," the editors added, "To sum up: Texas Republicans are trying to fix the enormous inefficiencies caused by federal and state renewable subsidies with state subsidies that cause more inefficiencies."

Florida teacher shows pro-Confederacy video that rebrands Civil War as 'War To Prevent Southern Independence'

SO DID DW GRIFFITH'S BIRTH OF A NATION

Brad Reed

RAW STORY
April 15, 2023

Confederate memorial (Shutterstock)

Parents in Naples, Florida are calling foul after a teacher at their children's school showed their class a video that they are decrying as propaganda for the Confederacy.

Local news station NBC 2 reports that an unidentified teacher at the Manatee Middle School is under investigation for showing students a video that gushes about the "valiant, brave fight and the countless sacrifices by our men and women during that known as the Civil War."

What's more, the video rebrands the American Civil War as "the War To Prevent Southern Independence," which is a decidedly pro-Confederacy framing for a conflict that centered on Southern states' attempts to preserve the practice of slavery.

“To me, it looks like straight out of a Confederate sympathizer playbook,” local parent Annie O’Donnell told NBC 2.

“It was very biased seeming,” local parent Casey Smith told NBC 2 about the video. “The confederacy, as far as I’m concerned, has always been a stain on American history.”

Collier County Public Schools emphasized that the pro-Confederacy video is not part of its official curriculum, although the state of Florida does officially recognize April as Confederate History Month.

'Disgusting' new robocall smears Tennessee Three as violent 'Antifa' radicals

USA HAS 2 JUSTIN'S, CANADA HAS 1

Brad Reed

RAW STORY
April 15, 2023

Justin Pearson and Justin Jones (AFP)

A new robocall is falsely accusing the three Tennessee Democrats targeted by Republicans for expulsion from the state legislature of being violent "Antifa" radicals.

Audio of the call, which was obtained by the Tennessee Holler, describes Tennessee Democrats Justin Pearson, Justin Jones, and Gloria Johnson as "radical activists posing as elected officials” who purportedly "led an angry mob of Antifa intending violence" to the Tennessee State Capitol building earlier this month.

The robocall also falsely claimed that law enforcement officials confiscated "pipe bombs" from demonstrators protesting against the three Democrats' expulsion.

According to the Tennessee Holler, the calls were funded by right-wing organization Enlighten Tennessee, whose stated goal is to "preserve the Conservative economic principles which make Tennessee the greatest state in the country to live."

Gloria Johnson, the one Tennessee Democrat who survived the expulsion vote, reacted angrily to the robocall, which she decried as "disgusting."

"Antifa? Pipe bombs?" she asked incredulously. "I guess parents brought them in strollers with their babies and toddlers. I didn’t know they made brass knuckles for children. This is disgusting, disgraceful, and it’s going to get someone hurt."

Johnson also hinted at legal action against the call and revealed that she's "already have had my lawyer on the phone" to talk about options.

Spanish Woman, 50, Emerges from Cave After 500 Days Alone Underground: 'I Didn't Want to Come Out'

Abigail Adams
Fri, April 14, 2023 

Beatriz Flamini of Madrid began living 230 feet below ground in November 2021 as part of a project called "Timecave"

JORGE GUERRERO/AFP via Getty Images

A Spanish athlete has emerged from an underground cave after 500 days of isolation.

Beatriz Flamini, 50, of Madrid, entered the cave in southern Spain on Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021, according to the Associated Press and Reuters.

She finally exited the cave — which was about 70 meters (230 feet) underground — around 9 a.m. local time on Friday, the AP reported.

Flamini said she passed the time by exercising, reading books, drawing, painting, and knitting, per the reports.

"In fact, I didn't want to come out," she said.

JORGE GUERRERO/AFP via Getty Images

Flamini was 48 years old when she first entered the cave in Granada, according to the BBC and Reuters.

During the experiment, Flamini was monitored by psychologists, researchers and speleologists, who study caves, though they never made contact with her, per the reports.

Flamini said she lost track of time after about two months, according to the AP and BBC. However, the mountaineer thought she had only been underground for about 160 or 170 days.

"When they came in to get me, I was asleep. I thought something had happened," Flamini told reporters, per Reuters' report. "I said: 'Already? Surely not.' I hadn't finished my book."

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Alba Feixas/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Flamini's 500-day adventure was part of a project called "Timecave," according to the AP. The goal was to assess how a human would handle living underground for a long stretch of time.

As part of the experiment, experts examined the impacts of social isolation and extreme temporary disorientation on the human body, per the BBC.

"I'm still stuck on November 21, 2021," Flamini told reporters on Friday. "I don't know anything about the world."

Flamini may have set a world record, too. Her team believes she holds the record for surviving the longest time while underground, though the Guinness Book of Records has yet to confirm.


Alba Feixas/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Flamini said she never considered pressing the panic button she was given, according to Reuters. She even pressed on through a fly invasion, which left her covered in bugs.

The extreme athlete also experienced "auditory hallucinations" while in the cave, per the BBC's report. She needed assistance standing up while speaking with reporters because of balance issues.

Still, Flamini was thrilled by the experience, which she called "excellent" and "unbeatable," according to the AP and BBC.

"You have to remain conscious of your feelings," Flamini said, per Reuters' report. "If you're afraid, that's something natural but never let panic in or you get paralyzed."

Read the original article on People.

N.L. Hydro aims to reuse poles treated with toxic substance recently banned by feds
CBC
Fri, April 14, 2023 

Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro plans to dismantle about 2,400 poles from an out-of-service line between Churchill Falls and Muskrat Falls. It hopes to reuse the wood, even though it's treated with a soon-to-be banned substance. (Patrick Butler/Radio-Canada - image credit)

Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro says it needs to dismantle nearly 2,400 electrical poles and plans to reuse the wood, even though it's been treated with a toxic substance recently banned by Ottawa.

The Crown corporation must decommission a 269-kilometre power line linking Churchill Falls and Muskrat Falls that hasn't been used since 2021, according to environmental assessment documents filed last month.

NL Hydro hopes to keep the poles, despite the fact they are coated with a toxic substance called pentachlorophenol (PCP), for future emergency repairs elsewhere in its transmission system.

Health Canada announced last fall that wood treated with PCP, a material it says presents concerns to humans and the environment, can no longer be used as of next October.

NL Hydro is seeking a "legal remedy" exempting it from the new federal rules and plans to leave the base of each of the 2,372 poles in the ground, meaning thousands of pieces of wood treated with PCP would be permanently embedded in the soil.

"Excavation of the underground segment of the pole could disrupt existing vegetation and increase risk of sedimentation in the area. It is utility practice to cut the pole at the base to avoid any further disturbance around the structures," said Jill Pitcher, a spokesperson for the province's main electricity generator.

Pitcher's emailed statement added that "the potential reuse of some PCP treated materials in the short term will not negatively impact wildlife."

Canadian electrical utilities have used PCP to preserve electricity and telephone pole since the mid-1930s and PCP-treated poles installed prior to next October do not have to be removed or replaced under the new rules.

Striking a balance

Nicolas Reynier, a research scientist at Natural Resources Canada, said in a French interview with Radio-Canada that in an ideal world, each PCP-treated pole on the line would be removed in its entirety, as would the soil surrounding every pole's base. That material would then be sent to a specialized facility that could extract the PCP, as well as highly toxic byproducts known as dioxins and furans.

But such a process, as well as the transportation needed, would be extremely expensive, said Reynier, who studied PCP and soil decontamination for four years at Quebec's Institut national de la recherche scientifique.

In fact, N.L. Hydro's environmental assessment submission, prepared by Stantec Consulting, said it "investigated the alternative of transporting treated wood to an approved recycling facility out-of-province; however, this alternative was cost-prohibitive."

"From the point of view of the life cycle of the pole, these poles have already been treated, they've already been in service for several decades…. Disposing of them in a landfill [without removing the toxic substances] isn't much better environmentally," Reynier said.

"It's not a good idea to reuse these poles that contain PCP, but seeing it's been years or even decades since they were installed, the potential of this substance to make its way into the environment is very low. If there was any pentachlorophenol that could have 'escaped' from the pole, it has already," he said.

Pam Miller, the founder of Alaska Community Action on Toxics, a group fighting for a global ban on PCP, said despite the potential costs, "there should be no exemption given the known environmental and health harms associated with this substance and the fact that there are safe and available alternatives."

"I do think it's problematic to leave PCP-treated wood below ground level as it will continue to leach into surrounding soil and groundwater, potentially exposing wildlife and people to this highly hazardous chemical."

Supply chain concerns

Health Canada's ban on PCP was based on input from officials in Switzerland, New Zealand, and Japan, as well as the European Commission, according to the department's website.

N.L. Hydro said as a member of industry group Electricity Canada it's advocating for "continued use of PCP-treated materials to mitigate short term supply chain risk and potentially reduce landfill waste."

In a statement, Health Canada said it is currently reviewing a submission from Electricity Canada.

"Due to stakeholder concerns, this application is being fast-tracked," wrote spokesperson Nicholas Janveau in an email.

The decommissioning project, whose environmental assessment has only just begun, will take five years, with about 50 kilometres of work completed each year between May and September.

N.L. Hydro says many of the poles will not be reused "due to the age of the infrastructure."

UPEI classes to resume Monday after deal ends 4-week strike


CBC
Fri, April 14, 2023 

UPEI faculty members walk the picket line at a campus entry point on April 13. Rallies planned for Friday by the union and by students were cancelled in light of the news of a tentative agreement. (Laura Meader/CBC - image credit)

A tentative agreement reached early Friday has now been ratified, ending a labour dispute at the University of Prince Edward Island on the 26th day of a strike by the union representing faculty members.

UPEI Faculty Association president Michael Arfken said 98 per cent of members voted in favour of the agreement.

"That's a strong vote in support of the agreement and support of the union," Arfken said. "We're very pleased, and our members are excited to be going back to campus, and going back to campus with some of the supports they need to preserve the educational quality of our institution."

Among the highlights in the deal, Arfken cited:

UPEI committing to hire 20 additional full-time faculty members.


More research support for faculty.


More supports for sessional staff and the adjustment of clinical nursing instructor ratios.


An annual three-per-cent wage increase for union members over four years.

"Those are some pretty meaningful changes," Arfken said, adding that the wage increase is a "significant improvement" over what was originally offered.

"We recognize it's a compromise, but we're comfortable with where it landed for the time being."

Laura Meader/CBC

Classes resume Monday

With the agreement ratified, the strike will now end and faculty will return to work.

Classes are set to resume Monday, following an emergency meeting of the university's senate Friday afternoon to finalize a return-to-class plan.

Here's some of the major details of the university's plan:

There will be no formal final examination period, which allows for instructional and assessment times to be extended while keeping the winter semester end date the same.

The last day of instruction will be April 28. For the Atlantic Veterinary College, it will be May 5.

Instruction or assessments after April 28 will be virtual. Any instruction or assessments after April 15 for the classes of 2023 and 2024 will also be done online.


Assessments may happen during class time, through take-home, or online, until April 28.


The deadline to discontinue without academic penalty has been extended to April 18.


Students will have the option to appeal for their grades to be shifted to pass/fail after their final numerical grades are determined.

Convocation dates won't change.

Instructors agree to "make every reasonable effort" to accommodate the needs of individual students as related to issues arisen from the strike.

Steve Bruce/CBC

A UPEI Student Union survey sent out to full-time students found the vast majority of students preferred either a refund (53.9 per cent), or for credits to be awarded as normal or on a pass/fail basis (42.8 per cent).

Only 3.2 per cent of 2,273 respondents wanted an extended semester.

Premier meets with UPEI, faculty association

Premier Dennis King said he met with UPEI officials and faculty association representatives Thursday, and said he learned a settlement was reached shortly after midnight Friday.

"I commend representatives of both sides for putting the interests of students first and working hard to reach an agreement that works for both sides," King said in a news release.

"I want to thank both parties for hearing me out yesterday so that our students can get back to the classroom on Monday and finish their semester."

I think if the board of governors had been willing to work with us from Day 1, much if not all of this could have been avoided. - Michael Arfken, UPEI Faculty Association president

Faculty association members have been on the picket line for nearly four weeks, since March 20. The strike put a stop to university classes and left students wondering when — or whether — the semester might resume.

The UPEIFA's last collective agreement had been set to expire on July 1, 2020, but the parties signed a two-year extension that ended last June.

"I will say, it shouldn't have been necessary to go on strike for four weeks to achieve this agreement," Arfken said. "I think if the board of governors had been willing to work with us from Day 1, much if not all of this could have been avoided."

The two sides had been in negotiations on and off since April 2022.

The primary sticking points at the bargaining table were workloads, improved health and safety, higher pay, and the hiring of more full-time faculty members to cope with a growing student body.

ALBERTA 

FIRST IT WAS TAR SANDS TAILINGS NOW THIS

Coal mine wastewater spill spurs AWA’s call for better oversight

Local Journalism Initiative
Fri, April 14, 2023 

Two unreported incidents of coal wastewater releases by CST Canada Coal’s (CST Coal) operations in Grande Cache have prompted the Alberta Wilderness Association (AWA) to call for more stringent oversight by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER).

“One of our major concerns is we're wondering when was the last time these facilities had a safety inspection done, and what was found during those safety inspections,” said Devon Earl, conservation specialist with the AWA.

The first incident occurred on Dec. 29, 2022 when approximately 107,000 litres of coal wash water was released from CST Coal’s Grande Cache mine site. The larger of the two incidents took place on March 4, 2023 when 1.1 million litres of coal fines (water and coal fine particles) were released into the Smoky River.

She referred to the AER’s Dam Safety Program Reports, which summarize safety inspections. The latest available report for 2021 doesn’t break down into inspections of specific facilities or what the results of each inspection were. Searching for “CST” or “Grande Cache” similarly revealed no results.

It does state, “In 2021, the AER received 243 dam-related regulatory submissions (e.g., plans, reports, notifications) and conducted 98 dam inspections. No critical safety deficiencies were identified.”

The 2021 report was published in April 2022, which infers that the 2022 report (that should include details of CST Coal’s first incident) would be published sometime this month.

“We would really like to see that especially for some of these spills,” Earl said.

“When was the last time those facilities were inspected? What did they find? I think that's really important for us to be able to know and for the public to be able to know just in terms of transparency. I think that's something that should be posted online and made publicly available. We haven't been able to find that.”

Coal wastewater is known to have detrimental effects on fish and aquatic ecosystems. Selenium is a common pollutant from coal mining, and can potentially cause deformities and reproductive failure for fish. Coal mining pollutants can also interrupt seasonal migrations and lead to extirpation in affected watersheds.

“The AER needs to ensure that no fish have been harmed by these spills,” said Phillip Meintzer, AWA conservation specialist, in a prepared statement to The Fitzhugh. “If these companies are going to be permitted to operate, then they need to be held accountable for their actions, and our regulator needs to step up to the task.”

The homepage of the AER’s website, however, devotes a banner to the much-publicized Imperial Oil Kearl Oil Sands Incidents, which involves two Imperial Oil’s operations approximately 45 kilometres northeast of Fort McKay. That links to the AER’s page for Ongoing Investigations, which only includes information about the Imperial Oil Kearl incidents.

A general search for “CST Coal” on the AER site had no results regarding any of that company’s wastewater releases in Grande Cache. The site does, however, include a Compliance Dashboard page that includes 2,511 entries of incidents dating back to June 2013.

This page does include the two CST Coal incidents but leaves out the amounts involved. A tab for the AER’s Investigations does indicate that the two incidents are in Phase 1, which is when AER staff collect information and conduct a site and incident assessment.

This still leaves the AWA and the rest of the public out in the cold wondering about what happened and how bad it is.

The work of the AER is not just to regulate energy development, but in doing so it also upholds the responsibility of allocating and conserving water resources, managing public lands, and protecting the environment

Earl said that this form of public trust needs to be transparent in order for it to function for the public good.

“Their job is to make sure that industry is running in such a way that's not putting the environment and public health at risk,” Earl said.

“I think some of these incidents lately point to the fact that we might need to ramp up that oversight and make sure that we're holding companies accountable, and make sure that they're not putting human health and the environment at risk with their operations.”

CST Canada Coal Ltd. did not respond to the Fitzhugh’s request for comment by press time.

After the story went to press, however, the Alberta Energy Regulator provided an email response to several questions.

The AER confirmed that it was notified of the two incidents via the 24-hour EDGE reporting line on January 2, 2023 and March 6, 2023.

“Clean up has been complete by the CST Coal, as required. The area will be reinspected by the AER in ice free conditions,” read the statement.

When asked about the full environmental impacts of the two releases, the financial or other penalties that CST Coal faces, or how closely the AER would be following CST Coal to prevent such events in the future, the Alberta Energy Regulator said that it couldn’t comment further since these incidents are under active investigation.

Editor's note: The story was updated after publication.

Scott Hayes, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Jasper Fitzhugh

Teeth found in Dorset thought to belong to dinosaur never seen before in Britain

Joanna Davis
Fri, 14 April 2023 

Charmouth, where many fossils are found Picture: Tom Ormerod

Fossils of teeth found in Dorset, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire are believed to be the remains of the earliest relatives of birds, a group of dinosaurs called maniraptorans.

The fossils could belong to a dinosaur never seen before in Britain, according to Natural History Museum research conducted with help from artificial intelligence.

The findings include the oldest evidence in the world of the therizinosaur dinosaur, a large herbivore with long scissor-like claws which featured in the most recent Jurassic World film.

The Natural History Museum and Birkbeck College used machine learning to train computer models to identify which extinct animal the fossils were most likely to belong to.

The researchers gave the computers data about thousands of teeth from different dinosaur species and made 3D models of the fossils to find out which extinct creatures they were from.

Maniraptorans are thought to have walked the earth between 174 million and 164 million years ago during the Middle Jurassic era, but the new research suggests some of the dinosaurs could have existed almost 30 million years earlier.

Fossils from this time period are rare and little is known about the origins of these dinosaurs.

Simon Wills, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum, said: "Previous research had suggested that the maniraptorans were around in the Middle Jurassic, but the actual fossil evidence was patchy and disputed.

"Along with fossils found elsewhere, this research suggests the group had already achieved a global distribution by this time.

"The teeth we analysed include what are currently the only troodontid (a small bird-like dinosaur) and therizinosaur fossils ever recorded from the UK and are the oldest evidence of these dinosaurs anywhere in the world."

The Natural History Museum believes learning technology could be used more often to find out more about dinosaurs and their fossils.

First near-complete sauropod dinosaur skull found in Australia hints at ancient links between continents

The Conversation
April 13, 2023

Sauropod (Shutterstock)

In May and June of 2018, Australia’s first near-complete skull of a sauropod – a group of long-tailed, long-necked, small-headed dinosaurs – was found on a sheep station northwest of Winton in Queensland.

I was part of the dig team from the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum that made the discovery, and subsequently had the privilege of leading the team that studied the skull. After years of work, our results are published today in Royal Society Open Science.

The skull belonged to a creature we have dubbed “Ann”: a member of the species Diamantinasaurus matildae which shows surprising similarities to fossils found halfway across the world, lending weight to the theory that dinosaurs once roamed between Australia and South America via an Antarctic land connection.


The ‘Ann’ Site, dug in 2018. Trish Sloan / Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum

A good skull is hard to find

The sauropod dinosaurs have been a source of lifelong fascination for me, and finding a sauropod skull was one of my childhood dreams. Sadly, the fossil record is biased towards preserving sauropod limbs, vertebrae and ribs, and heavily against skulls.

This makes sense when you consider the processes that act on an organism’s body after it dies, which paleontologists call taphonomy.

Large, robust limb bones are resistant to decomposition, and if they are buried rapidly they might fossilize quite readily. Vertebrae and ribs comprise a significant proportion of a vertebrate skeleton, increasing their odds of preservation.

By contrast, sauropod skulls were relatively small, made up of many delicate bones that were only loosely held together by soft tissue, and seemingly easily detached from the end of the neck. They might also have been prime targets for carnivorous dinosaurs: the only previously described sauropod braincase from Australia preserves several bite marks from fierce theropods.


The original skull bones of the sauropod dinosaur Diamantinasaurus matildae. 

Trish Sloan / Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum

The bones of the skull were found around two meters beneath the surface, scattered over an area of about nine square metres. Much of the right side of the face is missing, but most of the left is present. Sadly, many of the bones show signs of distortion (presumably a result of post mortem scavenging or trampling), which makes physical reassembly of the skull a delicate process.

Modern technology recreates an ancient animal

This being the case, we set out to reconstruct the skull digitally. We CT scanned the bones at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. This enabled the internal features of each bone to be observed on a computer.

Inside one bone in the snout (which we also had scanned at the Australian Synchrotron), we found replacement teeth. It has long been known that sauropods, like crocodiles today, continually replaced their teeth throughout their lives.


CT scanning a sauropod skull at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. Adele Pentland

We also scanned all of the bones with a surface scanner, enabling detailed 3D models of each bone to be made on a computer. The skull could then be reassembled in a virtual space with no risk of damage to the fossils themselves.

The teeth in the new sauropod skull were very similar to those found at other sites in the Winton area. Comparisons with Australia’s only other fragmentary sauropod skull (also from Winton) revealed additional similarities.
Meet Diamantinasaurus matildae

Our skull belongs to the species Diamantinasaurus matildae. Diamantinasaurus would have been about as long as a tennis court, as tall as basketball ring at the shoulder, and weighed ~25 tonnes – about as much as two fire engines.

Diamantinasaurus occupies a low branch on the family tree of a group of sauropods called titanosaurs. Other members of the titanosaur group (from higher branches on their family tree) include the largest land animals that ever lived, such as Patagotitan and Argentinosaurus, which exceeded 30 meters in length. Titanosaurs were the only sauropods to live right until the end of the Cretaceous Period (66 million years ago), when the age of dinosaurs came to a close.

Diamantinasaurus has a rounded snout, typical of medium- to high-level browsing sauropods. Its teeth are robustly constructed, but those from other sites show little sign of wear by soil or grit, reinforcing the idea Diamantinasaurus preferred to feed some distance above ground level.


The reconstructed skull of Diamantinasaurus matildae, viewed from the left side. Stephen Poropat / Samantha Rigby

Only two replacement teeth are present in each tooth socket, implying that Diamantinasaurus replaced its teeth relatively slowly. And finally, the teeth are restricted to the front of the snout, meaning that Diamantinasaurus, like all other sauropods, did not chew its food.
Family resemblances

We compared our sauropod skull with others from around the world. The most similar skull was that of Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, which lived in southern South America. Diamantinasaurus and Sarmientosaurus lived at around the same time (about 95 million years ago), and at around the same latitude (50°S).

We had previously hypothesised that these two sauropods were close relatives, albeit on the basis of limited evidence. The new skull shores up that idea in a big way: bone for bone, the skulls of Diamantinasaurus and Sarmientosaurus are extremely similar. This might seem strange, given the great physical distance between South America and Australia today. However, back then each of those continents retained a lingering land connection with Antarctica.

Sauropods seemingly preferred warmer climates at low to medium latitudes. However, 95 million years ago the climate was extremely warm, even by the warm standards of the Cretaceous. With polar latitudes more amenable for sauropods, these scaly behemoths – and other landlubbing animals – could trundle through lush forests at the bottom of the world between South America and Antarctica.

It is a privilege to be able to finally put a face to the name Diamantinasaurus matildae. Future discoveries will hopefully help cement its status as one of the most completely understood titanosaurs worldwide.

Stephen Poropat, Research associate, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.