Wednesday, October 30th, 2013
Stephan: I still get climate denier emails, and a friend wrote to tell me that he had just come from a presentation by a man who presents himself as a research based futurist, who proclaimed he had done a lot of 'research' and found no evidence of human mediated climate change. I have gone from thinking of people like this as willfully ignorant morons, to seeing them as a toxic obfuscating force in society.
The average summer temperature in the eastern Canadian Arctic is higher than in any previous century in the past 44,000 years – and perhaps the highest in 120,000 years – reflecting what scientists call an unprecedented warming of the region due to climate change, according to a new study by the University of Colorado, Boulder.
‘This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,’ Gifford Miller, a study leader, said in a joint statement from the school and the publisher of the journal Geophysical Researcher Letters, which published the findings this week.
The study, according to the statement, presents the first direct evidence that the present warmth in the Canadian Arctic exceeds the peak warmth there when Earth’s last glacial period ended, about 11,700 years ago. In the early stages of that period, the amount of the sun’s energy reaching the Northern Hemisphere during summer months was roughly 9 percent greater than today, causing world sea levels to rise about 115 feet.
Researchers took dead moss clumps from receding ice caps on Baffin Island, the world’s fifth-largest island, west of Greenland, and […]
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Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
MICHAEL HILTZIK, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Here is the latest on a trend SR has been following for several years, the corruption of science, and peer reviewed literature.
In today’s world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you’d think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.
You’d be wrong. Many billions of dollars’ worth of wrong.
A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.
The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test - that the original results couldn’t be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.
But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.
‘Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research,’ observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen’s head of global cancer research, ‘this was a shocking result.’
Unfortunately, it wasn’t unique. A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany similarly found that only 25% of published papers on which it was basing R&D projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which the firm had sunk huge resources should be abandoned. Whole fields of […]
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Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
MICHAEL SNYDER, - Global Research - Centre for Research and Globilization
Stephan: This is the latest on Fukushima and the impact it is making on the U.S. West Coast. This directly affects me, as well as tens of millions of other Americans, and there doesn't seem to be a thing we can do about it.
Click through to see the map referenced.
The map below comes from the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center. It shows that radiation levels at radiation monitoring stations all over the country are elevated. As you will notice, this is particularly true along the west coast of the United States. Every single day, 300 tons of radioactive water from Fukushima enters the Pacific Ocean. That means that the total amouont of radioactive material released from Fukushima is constantly increasing, and it is steadily building up in our food chain. Ultimately, all of this nuclear radiation will outlive all of us by a very wide margin. They are saying that it could take up to 40 years to clean up the Fukushima disaster, and meanwhile countless innocent people will develop cancer and other health problems as a result of exposure to high levels of nuclear radiation. We are talking about a nuclear disaster that is absolutely unprecedented, and it is constantly getting worse. The following are 28 signs that the west coast of North America is being absolutely fried with nuclear radiation from Fukushima
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Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
EVAN HALPER, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: I have been watching for some months the rise of a new trend in which your driving habits are constantly monitored. Now the next step is emerging. This and their smartphone will geographically place virtually every person in American minute-by-minute. It is really quite amazing what is happening. Between this and the surveillance, everyone is accounted for. That's an impossible position for a democracy.
WASHINGTON — As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.
The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America’s major roads.
The usually dull arena of highway planning has suddenly spawned intense debate and colorful alliances. Libertarians have joined environmental groups in lobbying to allow government to use the little boxes to keep track of the miles you drive, and possibly where you drive them – then use the information to draw up a tax bill.
The tea party is aghast. The American Civil Liberties Union is deeply concerned, too, raising a variety of privacy issues.
And while Congress can’t agree on whether to proceed, several states are not waiting. They are exploring how, over the next decade, they can move to a system in which drivers pay per mile of road they roll over. Thousands of motorists have already taken the black boxes, some of which have […]
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Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
Stephan: As another consequence of the over-reach of U.S. surveillance, I think changes are coming to the internet. This report is just one example of the stories that are beginning to show up.
As expected, President Dilma Rousseff, who recently canceled a planned state visit to Washington over reports of U.S. spying on the Brazilian government, took advantage of her speech to the U.N. General Assembly to respond to the allegations. She laid out a vision of cybersecurity and net neutrality that is probably at odds with how those concepts are usually understood by privacy advocates in the United States:
As many other Latin Americans, I fought against authoritarianism and censorship, and I cannot but defend, in an uncompromising fashion, the right to privacy of individuals and the sovereignty of my country. In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy. In the absence of the respect for sovereignty, there is no basis for the relationship among Nations.
We face, Mr. President, a situation of grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties; of invasion and capture of confidential information concerning corporate activities, and especially of disrespect to national sovereignty.
We expressed to the Government of the United States our disapproval, and demanded explanations, apologies and guarantees that […]
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