IAN SAMPLE, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is a story that confirms the point I made about geo-engineering in Saturday's edition.
Controversial geoengineering projects that may be used to cool the planet must be approved by world governments to reduce the danger of catastrophic accidents, British scientists said.
Met Office researchers have called for global oversight of the radical schemes after studies showed they could have huge and unintended impacts on some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The dangers arose in projects that cooled the planet unevenly. In some cases these caused devastating droughts across Africa; in others they increased rainfall in the region but left huge areas of Brazil parched.
‘The massive complexities associated with geoengineering, and the potential for winners and losers, means that some form of global governance is essential,’ said Jim Haywood at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter.
The warning builds on work by scientists and engineers to agree a regulatory framework that would ban full-scale geoengineering projects, at least temporarily, but allow smaller research projects to go ahead.
Geoengineering comes in many flavours, but among the more plausible are ‘solar radiation management’ (SRM) schemes that would spray huge amounts of sun-reflecting particles high into the atmosphere to simulate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.
Volcanoes can blast millions of tonnes of sulphate particles into the stratosphere, where they stay […]
No Comments
HANNAH JOHNSON, - University of Bristol (U.K.)
Stephan: This is an intriguing study. It is not quite clear what to make of it, but it may suggest that our ability to express emotion is declining as technology increases, and allows us to live our lives at arm's length, as it were.
The use of words with emotional content in books has steadily decreased throughout the last century, according to new research from the Universities of Bristol, Sheffield, and Durham. The study, published today in PLOS ONE, also found a divergence between American and British English, with the former being more ’emotional’ than the latter.
The researchers looked at how frequently ‘mood’ words were used through time in a database of more than five million digitised books provided by Google. The list of words was divided into six categories (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) previously used by one of the researchers, Dr Vasileios Lampos, to detect contemporary mood changes in public opinion as expressed in tweets collected in the UK over more than two years.
Dr Alberto Acerbi, a Newton Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol and lead author of the paper, said: ‘We thought that it would be interesting to apply the same methodology to different media and, especially, on a larger time scale. We were initially surprised to see how well periods of positive and negative moods correlated with historical events. The Second World War, for example, is marked by a distinct increase in […]
No Comments
LES LEOPOLD, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Here is how banking could operate if we had the political will to make Obama put people first, and to elect a Congress that would face down the too-big-to-fail Wall Street financial institutions.
North Dakota is the very definition of a red state. It voted 58 percent to 39 percent for Romney over Obama, and its statehouse and senate have a total of 104 Republicans and only 47 Democrats. The Republican super-majority is so conservative it recently passed the nation’s most severe anti-abortion resolution [3] – a measure that declares a fertilized human egg has the same right to life as a fully formed person.
But North Dakota is also red in another sense: it fully supports its state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND), a socialist relic that exists nowhere else in America. Why is financial socialism still alive in North Dakota? Why haven’t the North Dakotan free-market crusaders slain it dead?
Because it works.
In 1919, the Non-Partisan League, a vibrant populist organization, won a majority in the legislature and voted the bank into existence. The goal was to free North Dakota farmers from impoverishing debt dependence on the big banks in the Twin Cities, Chicago and New York. More than 90 years later, this state-owned bank is thriving as it helps the state’s community banks, businesses, consumers and students obtain loans at reasonable rates. It also delivers a handsome profit to its owners — […]
No Comments
