Trump backed environmental policy pushed by trade group after it spent over $700K at one of his properties: watchdog group

March 11, 2020 By Sky Palma


In the wake of President Trump’s 2017 announcement that he planned to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, his administration made a behind-the-scenes decision to back an Obama-era environmental policy that sought to limit refrigerants and coolants that contribute to climate change. But according to the government watchdogs Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the decision came after the trade group that heavily lobbied for the policy spent over $700,000 at Trump National Doral resort in Miami in 2017.

The Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) is a trade group that lobbies on the behalf of heating and cooling product manufacturers. According to CREW, it spent $700,650 for its Annual Meeting event in 2017 at the resort.

“The giant payment coincides with ramped up lobbying spending by the AHRI in Washington, DC including lobbying the White House around the time of the event,” CREW reports. “The timing of the event is conspicuous because less than two weeks after the November meeting, the Trump administration announced its support for a policy the AHRI had lobbied in favor of.”

As CREW points out, the policy was a key component of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda and was antithetical to Trump’s usual rhetoric about climate change. CREW acknowledges that there’s no direct evidence that Trump made the decision for financial gain, but the series of events shows what happens when a president refuses to divulge from previous business interests.

Read CREW’s report here.

Deadly poison used to kill weeds wreaks havoc on nearby farms
By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStory March 11, 2020

Sarah Okeson

Problems with dicamba, the herbicide that tricks weeds into growing so fast they die, were found more than 50 years ago, but the EPA under Obama approved new dicamba sprays in 2016 without independent testing of how prone the herbicide was to drift to damage other fields.

A jury deliberated just 30 minutes on Feb. 15 in a Southeast Missouri courthouse named after Rush Limbaugh’s grandfather before deciding on $250 million in punitive damages for the makers of the herbicide, Monsanto and BASF, in a case brought by an owner of a peach orchard. The companies were also ordered to pay $15 million in compensation.

Trump met with CEO Werner Baumann of Bayer, the German company that now owns Monsanto, soon after his election. Trump’s EPA kept dicamba on the market where concentrations in the air in Missouri’s Bootheel and Arkansas’s Delta have been compared to smog. The dicamba products’ EPA approval is set to expire Dec. 20 unless the agency extends it again.

So many farmers were spraying dicamba that a dicamba smog would build-up, often poisoning crops for an entire night.

“EPA understands that dicamba is a valuable pest control tool for America’s farmers,” Andrew Wheeler, then the EPA acting administrator, said in 2018.

Dicamba can damage soybeans that aren’t treated to resist it at concentrations in the air as low as one billionth of a gram per cubic meter. One tell-tale sign of damage in soybeans is “cupping” where necrosis on the leaf tip makes the leaf cup up. Peach trees like the ones on Bill and Denise Bader’s peach orchard spread over more than 1,000 acres near Campbell, Mo., are also ultra-sensitive to dicamba.

Steve Smith of Red Gold, the world’s largest privately held tomato canner, warned Congress in 2010 that widespread use of dicamba is “incompatible with Midwestern agriculture.”

Environmental groups including the National Family Farm Coalition and the Center for Food Safety sued the EPA and Monsanto in federal court in 2017. They claimed the EPA failed to analyze costs to farmers from drifting dicamba, “recklessly pushing to market” a product that damaged millions of acres of crops.

No Study of Drift

Monsanto denied requests by university researchers before the EPA approved the herbicide to study how likely it was to vaporize and drift across fields.

A three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit in January 2019, saying the case was moot because the EPA had extended the registration for the dicamba spray.

Bader Farms, the Missouri company that sued Monsanto and BASF, is the largest peach farm in Missouri with nearly 110,000 peach trees but puny compared to Monsanto and BASF. The farm is now expected to go out of business because of damage from dicamba.

Bader’s legal team asked for $200 million in punitive damages or 2.5% of Monsanto’s net worth. The company put that figure at $6.5 billion in 2017 and $7.8 billion in 2018.

Decimated Peach Crop

The three-week trial focused the damage to the Bader business which the couple started in 1987. Their peach harvest dropped from an average of 162,000 bushels in the early 2000s to as low as 12,000 bushels in 2018.

Weed scientist Ford Baldwin said so many farmers were spraying dicamba that a dicamba smog would build up, often poisoning crops for an entire night. In 2017, 80% of the cotton and 65% of the soybeans in the Bootheel were planted using Xtend seed from Monsanto and nearly all of it was sprayed with dicamba.

Bayer and BASF contended that illegal spraying by farmers, bad weather and soil fungus damaged the peach trees.

Bayer and BASF have said they plan to appeal the verdict. The lawsuit was the first of at least 140 similar cases to go to trial.

Trump’s company paid bribes to lower property tax bills: report





March 11, 2020 By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement


Real estate mogul Donald Trump’s firm, The Trump Organization, paid bribes through middlemen to New York City tax assessors to lower its property tax bills, according to a damning report by ProPublica.

Trump’s company paid the bribes in exchange for lowered tax bills “for several Manhattan buildings in the 1980s and 1990s, according to five former tax assessors and city employees as well as a former Trump Organization employee.”

Two of the five former city employees admitted they personally took the bribes. The other three said they knew about the bribes.

“The city employees were among 18 indicted in 2002 for taking bribes in exchange for lowering the valuations of properties, which in turn reduced the taxes owed for the buildings. All of the 18 eventually pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Manhattan except for one, who died before his case was resolved.”

The moment that corrupt assessors told their co-conspirators that the Trump Organization had agreed to pay bribes was memorable, said Frank Valvo, a former city assessor who served a year and a half in prison for his role in the scheme.

The excitement was palpable in the office, Valvo recalled, as one of the assessors broached the news. “He says, ‘We got Trump!’” Valvo recalled. “Wow. Holy Smokes.”

ProPublica notes that the Trump organization denies bribes were paid, and adds that there is no evidence that Donald Trump knew about them.

Trump Organization chief legal officer Alan Garten wrote in a statement: “If anything, the Trump Organization was a victim of the scandal.”

Read the full report here.

Tires Cause 1,000 Times More Pollution Than Exhaust Fumes, Study Claims
By James Gilboy, The Drive

With returns from tightening tailpipe emissions laws diminishing by the year, it may be time to look elsewhere for ways to reduce transportation-generated air pollution. We may already have some idea of where to look, too, as a Britain-based emissions testing group has identified a previously unsuspected culprit for modern air quality woes: Tires.© Joe Wilssens Photography With returns from tightening tailpipe emissions laws diminishing by the year, it may be time to look elsewhere for ways to reduce transportation-generated air pollution. We may already have some idea of where to look, too, as a Britain-based emissions testing group has identified a previously unsuspected culprit for modern air quality woes: Tires. This […]

This past Friday, Emissions Analytics released the results of an experiment wherein it tested "a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tires" to see how much "non-exhaust [particulate] emissions," abbreviated NEEs, the car generated. It concluded that wear on the vehicle's tires, brakes, and the road surface produced 5.8 grams of NEE particulates per kilometer driven, which is 1,289 times the 0.0045 grams-per-kilometer limit for passenger vehicle exhaust particulates under current Euro 6d emissions standards. This test's results may yet be conservative compared to real-world driving conditions, as cheap or under-inflated tires, rough road surfaces, and heavy vehicles are thought to increase NEE production.

The British government's Air Quality Expert Group attributes up to 73 percent of PM10 emissions--particles smaller than 10 microns--generated by transportation to NEEs, and that proportion may only increase with the popularity of heavy vehicles such as trucks, SUVs, and electric cars. Decaying infrastructure in some parts of the western world, especially the United States, serve only to highlight how severe the presently unregulated NEE pollution problem may be.

"It's time to consider not just what comes out of a car's exhaust pipe but particle pollution from tire and brake wear," declared Richard Lofthouse, a senior researcher at Emissions Analytics. "Our initial tests reveal that there can be a shocking amount of particle pollution from tires--1,000 times worse than emissions from a car's exhaust. What is even more frightening is that while exhaust emissions have been tightly regulated for many years, tire wear is totally unregulated--and with the increasing growth in sales of heavier SUVs and battery-powered electric cars, non-exhaust emissions (NEE) are a very serious problem."

The Drive reached out to Emissions Analytics for an explanation of the testing methodology it used for its experiment, and we will update when we receive comment.

UN: Last year was second-warmest and decade was hottest ever


By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press

Last Year Was the Second-Warmest on Record and the Decade Was the Hottest Ever, the U.N. Says

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Last year was the second warmest on record, the past decade was the hottest in human history and January was the warmest January since 1850, the head of the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday.

Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization also said Europe had a record-warm winter, and “we have also broken records in (emitting) carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide,” three greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Taalas said at a briefing on the agency’s annual State of the Global Climate 2019 report that carbon dioxide has contributed two-thirds of global warming, “and its lifetime is of several hundreds of years — so it’s a problem that doesn’t go away if you let these concentrations continue.”

Sitting beside Taalas, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said: “Greenhouse gas concentrations are at the highest levels in 3 million years — when the Earth’s temperature was as much as three degrees hotter and sea levels some 15 meters higher.”

© AP Photo/Noah Berger, File FILE - In this Nov. 1, 2019, file photo, flames from a backfire consume a hillside as firefighters battle the Maria Fire in Santa Paula, Calif. The decade that just ended was by far the hottest ever measured on Earth, capped off by the second-warmest year on record, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

He added: “Ocean heat is at a record level, with temperatures rising at the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombs a second.”


Taalas said the warming of the oceans has led to unusual tropical storms, including one in Mozambique in March 2019 that was the strongest in the Southern Hemisphere “at least for the past hundred years.”

He said there is also an estimate “that sea water is the most acid in 25 million years ... and that’s going to have negative impacts on the sea ecosystems.”

Taalas also pointed to forest fires causing a lot of emissions, in the Arctic and Australia where “they were, again, record breaking.”

“Smoke and pollutants from damaging fires in Australia circumnavigated the globe, causing a spike in carbon dioxide emissions," he said.

Guterres said there is no time to lose “if we are to avert climate catastrophe.”

Many scientists say the use of fossil fuels, which are one of the main sources of greenhouse gases, need to end by the middle of the century if average temperatures on Earth are to rise no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, the target set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Guterres said the world is way off track for meeting the target, and “we have to aim high at the next climate conference in Glasgow in November.”

So far, he said, 70 countries have announced they are committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, joined by cities, banks, businesses and others, but this still represents only one-quarter of global emissions.

“The largest emitters must commit or our efforts will be in vain,” Guterres said.

He said the Group of 20 major economic powers account for 80% of world emissions.

In the coming months, the U.N. will be very actively engaging Western Europe nations, the U.S., Canada, China, India, Russia and Japan “in order to have as many as possible, ideally all of them, committed to carbon neutrality in 2050,” the secretary-general said.

Guterres pointed to “good news” from the European Union, which unveiled plans last week for its first-ever climate law that would make legally binding its executive arm’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century.

“Let’s hope that this example cal be followed by all the others,” he said.

Ultra-black butterflies may inspire future 'blackest-black' materials

Amanda Kooser

It may be time to ditch the Spinal Tap jokes and start dropping Iron Butterfly references when it comes to talking about the world's blackest-black materials.

© Provided by CNET "The black patches on the wings of some butterflies are 10 to 100 times darker than everyday black objects," said Duke University. Richard Stickney, Museum of Life and Science

Duke University doctoral student Alex Davis conducted a study on ultra-dark butterflies that could lead to new innovations in super-dark coatings. These coatings, the most famous of which is known as Vantablack, are used for everything from telescopes to art projects.

Video player from: YouTube (Privacy Policy)

But ultra-black butterflies like Rajah Brooke's birdwing butterfly give human-made coatings like Vantablack some serious competition. "As little as 0.06% of the light that hits them is reflected back to the eye," Duke said in a release on Tuesday.

What makes this phenomenon so intriguing is the light weight and thinness of the butterflies' natural coloration. Davis and colleagues used an electron microscope to take a super-close-up look at how the insects achieve this feat.

Zooming in on a butterfly wing reveals layers of scales. As for the ultra-black appearance, Duke described it as "an optical illusion created by the 3D structure of the butterflies' wing scales."

Microscope images highlight the details of these nanostructures, which appear as a series of ridges with honeycomb-like formations in between. The researchers discovered these "ridges and pillars are deeper and thicker in ultra-black scales compared to 'normal' black scales." 

© Provided by CNET A scanning electron microscope shows the structures of the wing scales of the Rajah Brooke's birdwing butterfly at three different levels of magnification. Alex Davis, Duke University

The butterfly scales aren't as black as Vantablack or similar coatings, but the paper noted they are thinner and can be fabricated at lower temperatures. The study calls for further research into the viability of turning this biological wonder into a synthetic material.

© Richard Stickney, Museum of Life and Science

The butterflies scrutinized in the study use black as a key part of their wing color schemes. Bright patches ranging from blue to green to red pop out against the ultra-dark backgrounds.

While scientists are fascinated by the potential for these nanostructures, the butterflies themselves might just be looking for a good time. "We think it's likely some sort of signal to mates or maybe a predator. But there's a host of other possibilities, and we're hoping to clear that up," said Davis.

Vantablack swallows everything it's painted on




 
a close up of a box: Surrey NanoSystems in the UK announced Vantablack, a nanotech material, in 2014 to much fanfare and many Spinal Tap jokes. It became known as one of the blackest-black materials ever created.At the time, Surrey NanoSystems described Vantablack as "revolutionary in its ability to be applied to lightweight, temperature-sensitive structures such as aluminium whilst absorbing 99.96% of incident radiation, believed to be the highest-ever recorded." None more black. Surrey has continued to refine Vantablack and even figured out how to make the light-absorbing coating work as a spray. It has since graced everything from wristwatch faces to high-end vehicles.
16 SLIDES © Provided by CNET





Surrey NanoSystems in the UK announced Vantablack, a nanotech material, in 2014 to much fanfare and many Spinal Tap jokes. It became known as one of the blackest-black materials ever created.At the time, Surrey NanoSystems described Vantablack as "revolutionary in its ability to be applied to lightweight, temperature-sensitive structures such as aluminium whilst absorbing 99.96% of incident radiation, believed to be the highest-ever recorded." None more black. Surrey has continued to refine Vantablack and even figured out how to make the light-absorbing coating work as a spray. It has since graced everything from wristwatch faces to high-end vehicles.

KLEIN FLASHBACK KENNEY RECYCLES USER FEES ON PROVINCIAL PARKS

SOMETHING ALREADY DONE ONCE AND A BIG FAIL IT WAS TOO

Strathcona Science Park users blindsided by province

March 10, 2020


On Feb. 29 the province announced it would handover 164 "small and under-utilized" parks to third parties to manage. One of those parks is the Strathcona Science Park. That has left the Edmonton Nordic Ski Club and Sunridge Ski Hill with an uncertain future. Photo Supplied


In a move to save $5 million, Budget 2020 revealed 20 provincial parks will see full or partial closures this year. PEANUTS
Eleven of those will be permanently closed, while nine will be accessible but without any services.

On Saturday, Feb. 29 the province announced it would hand over 164 “small and under-utilized” parks to third parties to manage. One of those parks is the Strathcona Science Park.

The club which has about 800 members including 100 biathlon athletes, received a provincial Community Initiatives Program grant to make $30,000 worth of upgrades to its biathlon range, but with their parks status unknown, the club president said everything is in a holding pattern of uncertainty. The club has leased the land, which is zoned to allow a firing range, since the 1990s.
“We’re in no man’s land,” Edmonton Nordic Ski Club president, Chris Hanstock, “We absolutely feel blindsided. If we were told if it was going to happen 2021, we could start planning and going through the proper processes but when the announcement came out, it was a big surprise. Really, there was no consultation. Even the people who work for Alberta Parks didn’t have much of a heads up than what the general public did.”

The Strathcona Science Park is the home of the Edmonton Nordic Ski Club’s biathlon range, which plays a crucial part in developing biathlon athletes across the province. It also hosts major provincial and western Canadian events. Photo Supplied

The venue recently hosted a provincial event with more than 200 athletes and it’s also home to the Western Canadian championship. Since there are so few biathlon courses in Alberta, Hanstock said if one is lost, it could hurt the future of the sport. In fact, this would be the third hit for the sport, following the UCP’s shuttering of the Alberta Sports Council in the 2019 budget, which they relied on for funding, and the end of the Alberta Lottery Fund, which allowed the club to build the current biathlon range.

Located in the same park, Sunridge Ski Hill is also facing the same uncertainty.

Hanstock acknowledges $5 million would be some sort of savings, but it’s merely a drop in the bucket when looking at the overall budget.

“Parks are something that people in this province hold dearly. And yeah maybe some of them aren’t used very much, but they were put there for a purpose and to be maintained for future generations. I just can’t fantom what their rationale was,” he said, adding usage of the Strathcona Science Park would counter any argument to delist it as a park.
The Edmonton Nordic president noted he was also shocked to learn the province would stop trail grooming in Kananakis next season as the club just sent 200 youth and adult athletes attend a ski race; If that disappears, that would be tragic as far as the sport is considered.”

According to Alberta Park’s website “work is underway to explore the feasibility of various alternate management approaches for each site”. As for a future with a third party operator, the department stated a community can benefit from divested sites by maintaining it for recreation and tourism opportunities.

“Sites removed from the parks system allow a greater range of uses that were previously not possible under government regulation. Successful transfer to a third party will enable these sites to continue to be part of the community while generating new economic opportunities,” read a statement on Albert Parks’ website.

Information about third-party agreements will be released on May 1.

The Sherwood Park Natural Area, a day-use park located along Range Road 231 just south of Highway 628, is also on the provincial list of parks subject to be removed from the provincial park system.

Rural Municipalities Association called the move is another “download” to municipalities from the provincial government.

“Not one square centimetre of Alberta Parks land is being sold,” Premier Jason Kenney wrote on his Facebook page on March 5. “Some sites with extremely low attendance (0.3 per cent of the Alberta Parks land base) will be returned to crown land, to ensure we aren’t frivolously spending taxpayers dollars. And some others will see improvements, by way of partnerships with non-profits or the private sector, to make a better experience for guests.”

Full closures will take place at Bleriot Ferry Provincial Recreation Area, Crow Lake Provincial Park, Greene Valley Provincial Park, Kehiwin Provincial Recreation Area, Little Fish Lake Provincial Park, Running Lake Provincial Recreation Area, Stoney Lake Provincial Recreation Area, Sulphur Lake Provincial Recreation Area, Sheep Creek Provincial Recreation Area, and Twin Lakes Provincial Recreation Area.

Partial closures are planned for Bow Valley Provincial Park – Barrier Lake Visitor Information Centre, Chain Lakes Provincial Recreation Area, Dinosaur Provincial Park – Comfort Camping, Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park – Tolman Bridge Campgrounds (East and West), Engstrom Lake Provincial Recreation Area, Gooseberry Provincial Recreation Area – Elbow Valley Visitor Centre, Gooseberry Provincial Park Lake, Lawrence Lake Provincial Recreation Area, Notikewin Provincial Park, and Smoky River South Provincial Recreation Area.

The Edmonton Nordic Ski Club president recommends if Albertans are dismayed by these changes to write to their MLAs; “Let them know you’re not happy about it and we can only hope if enough people do that, MLAs can have some sway in the decisions that are being made.”

The province recently announced fees will also increase such as $3 for base camping rates across most campgrounds and $10 for some comfort camping and group sites.

Planet is 'way off track' in dealing with climate change, U.N. says

Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

Will temperatures continue to rise in the U.S.?

The planet is "way off track" in dealing with climate change, a new United Nations report says, and experts declared that climate change is a far greater threat than the coronavirus.

"It is important that all the attention that needs to be given to fight this disease does not distract us from the need to defeat climate change," U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday, according to Agence France Presse.

Although emissions have been reduced due to the virus, Guterres noted that "we will not fight climate change with a virus. Whilst the disease is expected to be temporary, climate change has been a phenomenon for many years, and and will remain with us for decades and require constant action.  

  

© Saeed Khan, AFP via Getty Images Firefighters conduct back burning measures to secure residential areas from encroaching bushfires at the Mangrove area in Central Coast, some 90 kilometers north of Sydney on Dec. 7, 2019. Bushfires are common in the country but scientists say this year's season has come earlier and with more intensity due to a prolonged drought and climatic conditions fueled by global warming.

"We count the cost in human lives and livelihoods as droughts, wildfires, floods and extreme storms take their deadly toll,” Guterres said.

The report confirmed that 2019 was the second-warmest year on record and the past decade the hottest in human history.

2019 ended with a global average temperature that was 1.1 degree Celsius above estimated pre-industrial levels, second only to the record set in 2016, when a very strong El Niño event contributed to an increased global temperature atop the overall warming trend.

“We are currently way off track to meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement calls for,” wrote Guterres in the report.

"Greenhouse gas concentrations are at the highest levels in 3 million years – when the Earth’s temperature was as much as 3 degrees hotter and sea levels some 15 meters higher,” said Guterres at a joint press conference with World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas at UN headquarters in New York.

The main greenhouse gases that cause global warming are carbon dioxide and methane, which are emitted from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

“Given that greenhouse gas levels continue to increase, the warming will continue. A recent decadal forecast indicates that a new annual global temperature record is likely in the next five years. It is a matter of time,” said Taalas.

“We just had the warmest January on record. Winter was unseasonably mild in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Smoke and pollutants from damaging fires in Australia circumnavigated the globe, causing a spike in carbon dioxide emissions.

Record temperatures in Antarctica were accompanied by large-scale ice melt and the fracturing of a glacier which will have repercussions for sea-level rise, Taalas added.

Professor Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London, told the Guardian that "the report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it.

"It points to a threat that is greater to our species than any known virus – we must not be diverted from the urgency of tackling it by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Planet is 'way off track' in dealing with climate change, U.N. says

There's a new insect named for Lady Gaga, and it's every bit as otherworldly as the pop diva

Meet the Mother Monster of the insect world.

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

© Provided by CNN The resemblance is uncanny, though

 Kaikaia gaga's aesthetic may hew more closely to Lady 

Gaga's punkish "Born This Way" era.

Her name is Kaikaia gaga (named for Lady Gaga, natch) and she's every bit as otherworldly as the pop diva. She wears a pair of devilish horns on her head, and she's unlike any other species in the forest.

Kaikaia gaga is a newly identified species of treehopper, an ostentatious but little-known insect group that populates most forests on Earth. A paper detailing her discovery was recently published in the journal Zootaxa, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on animal taxonomy. 

© L. Brian Stauffer/UI Public Affairs Kaikaia gaga is the newest species of treehopper, a common insect group known for its bright colors and ostentatious flair. The newest find shares a name -- and idiosyncratic style -- with Lady Gaga.

But treehoppers have never gotten their due, according to Brendan Morris, an entomology graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studied and named the new insect.

K. gaga is poised to change that. 

A one-of-a-kind find

Morris knew the discovery mattered: The ruddy insect, with her pointy horns and unique body structure, more closely resembles "Old World" species endemic to Asia, Africa and Europe. But she's native to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua.

So to shine a glittery spotlight on the new species, Morris named it after one of music's great iconoclasts.

"If there is going to be a Lady Gaga bug, it's going to be a treehopper, because they've got these crazy horns, they have this wacky fashion sense about them," Morris said in a university news release. "They're unlike anything you've ever seen before."

They're certainly among the most theatrical of all insects: Treehoppers are splashed with color, and no two species look alike.

"It blows my kind that a group that is roughly 40 million years old has so much diversity of form -- diversity, I would argue, that we don't see in any other family of insects," Morris said.

CNN reached out to Morris for comment and will add their responses when they're available.
She's still an enigma

There's still a lot left to learn about K. gaga, like how she wound up in the Americas and how she evolved.

But attempts to extract DNA from her specimen haven't been successful. She was collected in the early 1990s and sat in a museum before Morris and paper co-author, Illinois Natural History Survey entomologist Christopher Dietrich, decided to take a closer look.

Soon, Morris will head to her native Nicaragua to hopefully find more of her.

Lady Gaga has yet to comment on the discovery of the eponymous insect, but K. gaga's debut was certainly well-timed: The human Gaga premiered a new single and music video at the end of February.

A theory on why Trump's GOP approval rating (the real one) is so high

By Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Content Agency

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

© Provided by Tribune 

Early Monday morning, Donald Trump tweeted: "94% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, a record. Thank you!"

Where the president got this specific number remains a mystery. Recent polls by YouGov put his GOP approval roughly 10 points lower, and Gallup, which has tracked Trump's popularity since he took office, puts him at 88 percent.

But I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that Trump used his Sharpie to round up his score. He's deeply invested in being -- or at least claiming to be -- the most popular Republican president in history. In July of 2018, he announced: "I am the most popular person in the history" of the GOP. "Beating Lincoln," Trump added. "I beat our Honest Abe."

For what it's worth, polling in the 1860s wasn't exactly reliable. But even if Trump's oft-repeated 94 percent number were accurate, and even if it beat Lincoln's ratings, it still wouldn't beat George W. Bush's 99 percent after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Why the president feels the need to embellish is already a well-spelunked psychological rabbit hole. But even ignoring his exaggerations, he is consistently hitting in the mid- to high 80s with Republicans in polling, which demands a question: Why are his actual numbers so high?

George W. Bush's 99 percent might offer some insight. Americans generally rally around a president during a war or national crisis. But members of the president's own party in particular can be counted on to fall in line.

The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein argues that the key to understanding the president's standing with Republicans is that Trump is behaving like a wartime president, but the enemy is "Blue America." Trump's almost daily references to "treason" and enemies of the people may be driven by his own narcissism and persecution complex, but they resonate with a share of the electorate that believes the cultural war really is tantamount to a cold civil war.

While Trump has made it worse, this dynamic is not new. He is more the beneficiary (and exacerbator) of the polarized landscape than the creator of it. Party identification has been declining for Democrats and Republicans alike, but for those who cling to the label, the label has more meaning than it used to.

Until around 2000, it was normal for self-identified Republicans and Democrats to criticize presidents of their own parties, because people didn't cling to partisan identity nearly as fiercely. The Bill Clinton impeachment battle was a foretaste of where we are. But even during the polarized presidency of George W. Bush, partisan dissent and defections were fairly common. Existential partisanship intensified under Barack Obama's presidency, on both the right and left.

The wartime atmosphere Trump has established encourages partisans to overlook faults with their own side more than ever, because in the zero-sum logic of war, any dissent is seen as providing aid and comfort to enemies who would be worse if they gained power. Perhaps counterintuitively, Trump's myriad and manifest flaws actually intensify the effect. The need to justify your support makes it impossible to acknowledge any shortcomings at all. When Stuart Varney of Fox Business recently refused to admit that Trump ever lies, it was as if he understood that once you pull that thread a little, there's no telling where the unraveling will stop.
The irony is that the need to provide unwavering support for the president of your party is a direct function of the unwavering hostility from the president's critics. This is why polls may not be as reflective of reality as we often think. If you talk to pollsters, they will tell you that many voters understand how polls can be used as weapons and don't want to give the "enemy" any satisfaction.

Indeed, as I've argued before, there's a rough parallel with Republican support for Bush during the Iraq War. Many Republicans knew that the war wasn't going well but nonetheless supported Bush because he was a wartime president and they loathed his critics more than they disapproved of his performance. They'd be damned if they were going to give some pollster ammunition against the commander in chief. A similar dynamic explains Obama's rock-solid support among Democrats. They hated -- or feared -- Obama's enemies too much to abandon him, even if they had misgivings about him.

Both examples may shed some light on what's in store for Trump in the future. Support for Bush and the war alike started to plummet as he headed for the exit. One of the defining currents of the Democratic primaries is the base's disappointment with Obama's accomplishments, even as his personal approval remains high.

It may be that once Trump is no longer the commander in chief in the war against Blue America, the ardor of his troops will give way to a better understanding of the price the GOP paid on his watch.

(Jonah Goldberg's latest book, "Suicide of the West," is now available wherever books are sold. You can write to him in care of this newspaper or by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO.)