BILL MOYERS & COMPANY, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The attack on science by the Theocratic Right and the corporate interests destroying the earth have done great damage, but finally science is pushing back. We'll see.
Science is under attack. With corporations manufacturing uncertainty to undermine studies that hurt their bottom lines and the sequester cutting billions in funding for scientific research, you’d think the American science community would be hunkered down in their labs avoiding outside interference at all costs.
A new project of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the Center for Science and Democracy, is encouraging scientists to do just the opposite. The center encourages scientists to speak out and help others to better understand scientific information and to distinguish evidence from political positioning. We spoke with the Center’s director Dr. Andrew Rosenberg by phone this week. This is an edited version of our conversation.
Theresa Riley: In Bill’s conversation with public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, they talk about a ‘war on science
No Comments
JAMES HANSON, - The Age (Australia)
Stephan: We seem unable as a society to serve the whole and not just the wealthy few.
Exploiting oil and gas trapped in tar sands and shale threatens to make climate change ‘unsolvable,
No Comments
RICHARD A. LOVETT and NATURE MAGAZINE, - Nature
Stephan: An aspect of climate change that I, for one, never considered. The Earth is a vast complex interlocking system, and when one part changes the whole system changes. Only our arrogance, greed of the few, and the stupidity of our government keeps us from seeing this.
Global warming is changing the location of Earth’s geographic poles, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.
Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, report that increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet – and to a lesser degree, ice loss in other parts of the globe – helped to shift the North Pole several centimeters east each year since 2005.
‘There was a big change,
No Comments
DEAN FORBES, - Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Stephan: This is what the illness profit system has produced. There is no other advanced Western nation about which this story could be written. It is our great shame that we punish the severely ill over money.
SEATTLE – People diagnosed with cancer are more than two-and-a-half times more likely to declare bankruptcy than those without cancer, according to a new study from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Researchers also found that younger cancer patients had two- to five-fold higher bankruptcy rates compared to older patients, and that overall bankruptcy filings increased as time passed following diagnosis.
The study, led by corresponding author Scott Ramsey, M.D., Ph.D., an internist and health economist at Fred Hutch, was published online on May 15 as a Web First in the journal Health Affairs. The article will also appear in the journal’s June edition.
Ramsey and colleagues, including a chief judge for a U.S. Bankruptcy Court, undertook the research because the relationship between receiving a cancer diagnosis and bankruptcy is less well understood than the much-studied link between high medical expenses and likelihood of bankruptcy filing.
‘This study found strong evidence of a link between cancer diagnosis and increased risk of bankruptcy,’ the authors wrote. ‘Although the risk of bankruptcy for cancer patients is relatively low in absolute terms, bankruptcy represents an extreme manifestation of what is probably a larger picture of economic hardship for cancer patients. Our study thus raises important questions about […]
No Comments
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The Northern indigenous peoples, who have lived in the isolated Alaskan north are the first to fall victim to climate change. They will not be the only ones, as we will all discover in the coming years.
Click through to see the very sad video, and the many pictures that accompany this report.
NEWTOK, ALASKA — Sabrina Warner keeps having the same nightmare: a huge wave rearing up out of the water and crashing over her home, forcing her to swim for her life with her toddler son.
‘I dream about the water coming in,’ she said. The landscape in winter on the Bering Sea coast seems peaceful, the tidal wave of Warner’s nightmare trapped by snow and several feet of ice. But the calm is deceptive. Spring break-up will soon restore the Ninglick River to its full violent force.
In the dream, Warner climbs on to the roof of her small house. As the waters rise, she swims for higher ground: the village school which sits on 20-foot pilings.
Even that isn’t high enough. By the time Warner wakes, she is clinging to the roof of the school, desperate to be saved.
Warner’s vision is not far removed from a reality written by climate change. The people of Newtok, on the west coast of Alaska and about 400 miles south of the Bering Strait that separates the state from Russia, are living a slow-motion disaster that will end, very possibly within the next five years, with the entire village being washed away.
The Ninglick River coils around […]
No Comments
