D.S. WRIGHT, - Firedoglake
Stephan: As this report points out you'd think it would be self-evident, but research is dispositive so consider this: On the basis of data not political philosophy our social power structure is undeniably becoming a partnership of state and corporate interests, with the largest, Virtual Corporate States (VCS) being dominant. Until Citizens United is reversed, and we create publicly financed elections we are going to spiral downwards. Money is the acid corroding the structure of our demoscracy.
Warning: this may be painfully obvious. Just in case you, for some reason I can’t fathom, had doubts that money buys influence in Washington our friends in the ivory tower decided to perform a scientific experiment to prove it.
Joshua Kalla at Yale University and David Broockman at the University of California, Berkeley wanted to demonstrate that campaign donors were more highly valued to members of Congress than regular constituents (I warned you). So in partnership with CREDO Action they performed a field experiment to show that the wheels of government turn faster for those that promise to lubricate the gears with cash.
The experiment was performed by CREDO fellows sending emails to congressional offices with one of two different letters advocating the member of Congress co-sponsor a bill:
The first e-mail had the subject line: ‘Meeting with local campaign donors about cosponsoring bill.” The body of the e-mail said that about a dozen CREDO members ‘who are active political donors” were interested in meeting with the member of Congress in his or her home district to discuss the legislation.
The second e-mail stripped out the donor references and instead said ‘local constituents” were looking to […]
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AMANDA MARCOTTE, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Once in debating a creationist at a university I asked him, "What is wrong with the speed of light?" He answered, "Nothing." Then how, I asked, "can we be seeing light come from millions of light years ago?" Astronomy and astrophysics are far more dangerous to Creationism and Biblical inerrancy than evolution.
This apparently was not obvious to an Oklahoma television station, as this report describes, which ran the new Cosmos and edited out the evolution reference. This story also demonstrates how powerfully the Theocratic Right censors media over science in Red value states in a conjoining of the Willful Ignorance and the Great Schism Trends.
It’s hard to believe it’s an accident, I’ll say that much. The Fox affiliate-not Fox News, but just Fox-in Oklahoma City cut out the last 15 seconds of the airing of the new version of Cosmos featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, which just happened to be when he mentioned that human beings evolved just recently in relation to the universe.
You can click the link to see the original clip. If this was intentional and not a mistake, so many questions arise, starting with, ‘Well, how will they deal with the next episode?” You know, the one he was talking about that’s coming up next, where the history of human evolution promises to be dealt with at length? Or why was this particular 15 seconds more offensive to fundamentalist sensibilities than the entire segment leading up to it, which is about the age of the universe, which is just as lethal a scientific theory to the biblical understanding of humanity as the theory of evolution is.
Not that this contradiction suggests anything, really, about whether this was an accident or deliberate. One of the things I find most peculiar about the creationist movement is they focus so much on attacking biologists when, if […]
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Mareike Schodder, - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Stephan: This is, I believe, the definitive paper on what we know about sea rise and its impact on what are called "World Heritage" sites around the world, i.e., The Statue of Liberty, Venice, Bangkok. It is a very long term look -- 2,000 years -- rather like looking back on Rome.
The actual paper says, "We consider SLR over the next 2000 years. On this time scale, ocean heat content and glacier ice mass can be considered to be in equilibrium with global temperatures, and relatively independent of the warming path of the initial 100 years. Thus the largest uncertainty from the temporal evolution is mainly restricted to the contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. To facilitate the advantage of equilibrated ocean heat content and glaciers ice mass, we do not try to quantify the timing of a potential impact from SLR on the cultural heritage within the next 2000 years, but instead quantify the global mean temperature anomaly which will eventually lead to an impact anytime within the next 2000 years. At the same time, a time scale of 2000 years is short enough to be relevant for the societal discussion on climate change with regard to the cultural heritage, since a number of UNESCO sites are as old as or older than 2000 years." So this is not a it will happen on this date but, rather it will happen.
For those who are seriously interested I urge you to go to the paper: Loss of cultural world heritage and currently inhabited places to sea-level rise, to be found at: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/3/034001/article
From the Statue of Liberty in New York to the Tower of London or the Sydney Opera House — sea-level rise not only affects settlement areas for large parts of the world population but also numerous sites of the UNESCO World Heritage. This is shown in a new study by Ben Marzeion from the University of Innsbruck and Anders Levermann from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“The physical processes behind the global rise of the oceans are gradual, but they will continue for a very long time,” says climate scientist Ben Marzeion. “This will also impact the cultural world heritage.” The scientists computed the likely sea-level rise for each degree of global warming and identified regions where UNESCO World Heritage will be put at risk throughout the coming centuries. While public interest so far was focused mainly on ecological and agricultural impacts of climate change, Marzeion and Levermann in the journal Environmental Research Letters now put the focus on the cultural heritage of mankind.
136 out of 700 listed cultural monuments will be affected in the long-term
The UNESCO World Heritage List comprises a total of more than 700 cultural monuments. If global average temperature increases by just one degree Celsius, […]
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ANDREW RESTUCCIA, - Politico
Stephan: This is a really clear demonstration that Virtual Corporate States are above national politics or interests.
The standoff between the United States and Russia isn’t getting in the way of ExxonMobil’s lucrative relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime. At least not yet.
The U.S.-based oil and gas giant has spent years cultivating ties with the Kremlin, reaching a multibillion-dollar exploration deal with state oil company Rosneft in 2011. Putin even awarded Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson the Order of Friendship, one of Russia’s highest honors, for the company’s ‘big contribution to developing cooperation in the energy sector.”
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region could complicate Exxon’s work in the country, especially if the United States imposes strict sanctions.
‘As BP learned in the last decade, investing in Russian oil production means exposing your investment to largely unforeseeable risks,” said Paul Bledsoe, a senior fellow on energy and society at the German Marshall Fund. ‘While Exxon may have factored in the possibility of an embargo of Russian oil exports to their investment, they almost certainly assigned it a low probability, and now could pay a price in lower production.”
For now, Exxon doesn’t seem worried.
‘There has been no – I mean to this point, the current situation obviously is early days – no impact on any of our plans or activities at […]
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REBECCA RIFFKIN, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Nearly half of the United States population, and much of the Congress thinks climate change is a scam cooked up by scientists. Only 24 per cent worry much about it. This, as a result of the hundreds of millions spent by people like the Koch brothers in a carefully contrived disinformation and government buying campaign designed to protect and prolong the preeminence of carbon energy.
The price to humanity of this willful ignorance will be beyond measure.
Click through to see the charts, which are helpful, and download the report.
This article is the first in a series that will analyze Gallup’s latest March update on Americans’ views on climate change and examine how these views have changed over time. The series will explore public opinion on the severity and importance of climate change, its causes and effects, the extent of Americans’ understanding of the issue, and much more.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Twenty-eight U.S. senators held an all-night “talkathon” Monday to call attention to climate change, an issue that only 24% of Americans say they worry about a great deal. This puts climate change, along with the quality of the environment, near the bottom of a list of 15 issues Americans rated in Gallup’s March 6-9 survey. The economy, federal spending, and healthcare dominate Americans’ worries.
Americans’ Level of Worry About National Problems — 2014 Rank Order
This was the first year Gallup included “climate change” in the list of worries tested in the annual March Environment survey. Americans are less worried only about race relations than they are about climate change. The majority of Americans say they worry about these two issues “only a little” or “not at all”; more than half of Americans worry about the other 13 issues at least […]
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