Tuesday, September 10th, 2013
DANA NUCCITELLI, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Several of you sent me one version or another of the story first published in the British newspaper, The Mail, picked up by another British paper The Telegraph, then published here in the U.S. by many Rightist climate denier sites. The basic argument is that there has been a 60 per cent growth of Arctic sea ice, thus climate change is either not happening or has stopped. Some who sent it to me questioned it, others said it was proof I was wrong about climate change. As with most climate change denierism what we have here is yet another example of an incorrect interpretation of data by the willfully ignorant.
Here is the reality.
Click through to see the charts which are very helpful.
When it comes to climate science reporting, the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph are only reliable in the sense that you can rely on them to usually get the science wrong. This weekend’s Arctic sea ice articles from David Rose of the Mail and Hayley Dixon at the Telegraph unfortunately fit that pattern.
Both articles claimed that Arctic sea ice extent grew 60 percent in August 2013 as compared to August 2012. While this factoid is technically true, it’s also largely irrelevant. For one thing, the annual Arctic sea ice minimum occurs in September – we’re not there yet. And while this year’s minimum extent will certainly be higher than last year’s, that’s not the least bit surprising. As University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins noted last year,
‘Around 80% of the ~100 scientists at the Bjerknes [Arctic climate science] conference thought that there would be MORE Arctic sea-ice in 2013, compared to 2012.’
Regression toward the Mean
The reason so many climate scientists predicted more ice this year than last is quite simple. There’s a principle in statistics known as ‘regression toward the mean,’ which is the phenomenon that if an extreme value of a variable is observed, […]
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Monday, September 9th, 2013
ALEX HENDERSON, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: There is nothing really new in this report if you read SR regularly, but just seeing it all in one story is helpful to understanding the real scope of what has happened to us as a country.
In the post-New Deal America of the 1950s and ’60s, the idea of the United States becoming a banana republic would have seemed absurd to most Americans. Problems and all, the U.S. had a lot going for it: a robust middle-class, an abundance of jobs that paid a living wage, a strong manufacturing base, a heavily unionized work force, and upward mobility for both white-collar workers with college degrees and blue-collar workers who attended trade school. To a large degree, the nation worked well for cardiologists, accountants, attorneys and computer programmers as well as electricians, machinists, plumbers and construction workers.
In contrast, developing countries that were considered banana republics-the Dominican Republic under the brutal Rafael Trujillo regime, Nicaragua under the Somoza dynasty-lacked upward mobility for most of the population and were plagued by blatant income equality, a corrupt alliance of government and corporate interests, rampant human rights abuses, police corruption and extensive use of torture on political dissidents.
Saying that the U.S. had a robust middle-class in the 1950s and ’60s is not to say it was devoid of poverty, which was one of the things Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was vehemently outspoken about. King realized that the economic gains of […]
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Monday, September 9th, 2013
JOANNA M. FOSTER, - Think Progress
Stephan: It will be interesting to see whether hard evidence has any actual effect on how airlines route their planes. I will continue to watch this story.
As fall begins its descent, and people start pulling sweaters out from the backs of closets, the sun-seekers among us are already online browsing flights to warmer climes. For the climate conscious, flying has always been a guilty pleasure, but now research from MIT may help those bitten by the travel bug avoid the most climate polluting flights.
Out of 83,000 flight routes studied by the researchers from MIT’s aeronautics department, flights to and from Australia and New Zealand in October were guilty of creating the highest amounts of a potent global warming pollutant – tropospheric ozone. Tropospheric ozone is created when nitrogen oxides, released during the burning of jet fuel, react with carbon monoxide and other chemicals in the presence of sunlight.
The area around the Solomon Islands in the Pacific was found to be the most sensitive to airplane emissions. Here, just 1 kilogram of nitrogen oxide emissions can cause an additional 15 kilograms of tropospheric ozone annually. A flight from Sydney to Mumbai results in an extra 25,000 kilograms of tropospheric ozone.
This isn’t the first research to recommend rerouting certain flight paths. Last December, researchers from Stanford published data showing how flying around, rather than over the Arctic could […]
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Monday, September 9th, 2013
CARL HERMAN, - Washington's Blog
Stephan: The headline says it all, and I have been unable to get this statistic out of my mind since I read it this morning. We have beggared ourselves as a nation through an endless series of wars whose only beneficiaries are the war profiteers.
US current wars:
Orwellian unlawful because US armed attacks, invasions, and occupations of foreign lands are unlawful Wars of Aggression. Two treaties, the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter, make armed attacks on another nation unlawful unless in response to armed attack by that nation’s government. Importantly, all ‘reasons
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Monday, September 9th, 2013
ELLEN NAKASHIMA, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Obama talks a wonderful game. But this is what he is really doing. I think history is going to condemn him for the destruction of America's civil liberties. In matters of privacy and surveillance he is, in many ways, a worse President than Bush.
The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.
In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years – and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Declassified 2011 FISA court ruling
Opinion struck down an NSA program that unlawfully gathered thousands of electronic communications between Americans.
As civil war rages, traffic picks up between Syria and a little-known Ukrainian port linked to arms trade.
Move allowed agency to search for Americans’ communications.
What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban – at the government’s request – on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.
Together the permission to search and to […]
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