Rapidly rising temperatures already have had an ‘amazing and potentially troubling’ impact in the Arctic, a group of scientists reported in June after a year-long mission to study how global warming is changing the vast ice- and permafrost-covered region that surrounds the North Pole.

The NASA-sponsored mission, called CARVE — an acronym for ‘Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment’ — uses a specially-outfitted plane that flies low and slow above the pristine wilderness of Alaska’s North Slope and the Yukon River Valley, allowing it to measure the interaction of greenhouse gases between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere.

After its first three flights for 2013 (of a planned seven) concluded in June, the study already had its members re-thinking how quickly the Arctic’s permafrost is melting and what that might mean for the carbon stored deep in its frozen soil and sediments.

‘Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures — as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in just the past 30 years,’ the mission’s principal investigator, Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview.

‘As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as […]

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In 2011, scientists explained that the Greenland Ice Sheet ‘could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming

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A particularly troubling and consistent finding throughout the survey is that Wall Street’s future leaders-the young professionals who will one day assume control of the trillions of dollars that the industry manages-have lost their moral compass, accept corporate wrongdoing as a necessary evil and fear reporting this misconduct.’

In a shocking new survey [3] commissioned by the Labaton Sucharow law firm, Wall Street insiders say that breaking the law, screwing your clients and covering up crimes is a way of life on Wall Street. The shock is not that cheating is going on. We all know that. The shock is that these financiers would actually admit it on a survey. This should tell us that the Wall Street culture is so brazenly corrupt, so confident of not getting caught, so certain that a passive public won’t fight back that those surveyed didn’t even bother to lie about the fact that they were living, breathing sociopaths.

Here are some of the key findings of this sample of 250 traders, portfolio managers, investment bankers, hedge fund professionals, financial analysts, investment advisors, asset managers and stock brokers.

Catch me if you can!

‘24% of financial services professionals likely would engage in insider trading to make $10 million

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Few people can explain gas and oil drilling with as much authority as Louis W. Allstadt. As an executive vice president of Mobil Oil who ran the company’s exploration and production operations in the western hemisphere before he retired in 2000. In 31 years with the company he also was in charge of its marketing and refining in Japan, and managed its worldwide supply, trading and transportation operations. Just before retiring, he oversaw Mobil’s side of its merger with Exxon, creating the world’s largest corporation.

The first in a modest Long Island German-American family to graduate from college (the US Merchant Marine Academy), Allstadt got a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University then was hired by Mobil. Before his retirement he wasn’t aware of a new, sophisticated form of rock fracture, high-volume hydraulic fracturing, developed only in the late 1990s. ‘It just wasn’t on our radar at that time,’ he said. ‘We were heavily focused on developing conventional oil and gas offshore in deep water.’

Quaint, arty Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, is perched on the shores of Lake Otsego, which supplies drinking water to the village and glimmering, placid expanses for kayakers and boaters. Allstadt launched […]

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The following is an excerpt from Shut the Chamber’s new 28-page report, ‘Bagful of Cash: How the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Orchestrated a Corporate Takeover of Government.’ My goal when writing the report was to publish a one-stop-shop for everything relating to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s domination of all institutions of merit, from Congress to the courts, to the election cycles. This report also shows how the U.S. Chamber has invested millions of corporate dollars into opposing all legislation relating to healthcare, financial reform, closing corporate tax loopholes, and climate change. The report also highlights the U.S. Chamber’s support of austerity, fracking, the Keystone XL pipeline, and mostly Republican pro-corporate candidates running for Congress. You can read the full report at bit.ly/bagfulofcash.

Part III: The Corporate Takeover

People seem to listen to you more when you’ve got a bagful of cash.

– U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, The New York Times

According to Donohue, the Chamber raises $5 million per week to keep its operations running. Most of this money, however, comes from billion-dollar corporations, not small businesses. The U.S. Chamber has spent $983 million on lobbying since 1998, and has already spent […]

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