Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
Stephan: This is why what Senator Inhofe did was so very wrong. An entire country, indeed the world, will pay in suffering and coin, because a tiny group of corrupted politicians, of which he is an American leader, blocked any preparation or remediation.
The longer the U.S. holds off action to mitigate climate change, the more costly the effort will become, a new report shows
A new report estimates the cost of mitigating the effects of climate change could rise by as much as 40% if action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is delayed 10 years – immediately outweighing any potential savings of a delay.
The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, U.S. President Barack Obama’s source for advice on economic policy, compared over 100 actions on climate change laid out in 16 studies to extract the average cost of delayed efforts. Released Tuesday, the findings suggests policymakers should immediately confront carbon emissions as a form of ‘climate insurance.”
‘Events such as the rapid melting of ice sheets and the consequent increase of global sea levels, or temperature increases on the higher end of the range of scientific uncertainty, could pose such severe economic consequences as reasonably to be thought of as climate catastrophes,” the report reads. ‘Confronting the possibility of climate catastrophes means taking prudent steps now to reduce the future chances of the most severe consequences of climate change.”
The report also found that any increase in climate change amid that delayed action would gravely […]
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
Stephan: Further validation of the findings you have already read about on SR: Neonicotinoids are the modern equivalent, as a social trend, of DDT. Birds, butterflies, bees, humans and, undoubtedly, any other beings suffer because of these toxins.
Evidence continues to mount that a highly controversial class of pesticides blamed for widespread bee declines is also harming other creatures, perhaps catastrophically.
In a study of neonicotinoid pesticides and bird populations in the Netherlands, biologists found a close and troubling link. As neonicotinoid levels rose in streams, lakes and wetlands, populations of insect-eating birds declined. The pesticides appear to have eliminated the insects on which they rely.
‘These insecticides appear to be having more profound effects than just killing our pollinating insects,” said ecologist Caspar Hallmann of Radboud University in the Netherlands, an author on the new study, published today in Nature.
Hallmann and his colleagues analyzed two long-term, Netherlands-wide datasets: one of bird counts, and the other of surface water measurements of imidacloprid, the most common neonicotinoid.
First introduced in the 1990s, neonicotinoids have become ubiquitous in agriculture and gardening, and in recent years have been identified as a cause of dramatic die-offs in domestic honeybees. They’re also likely contributing to widespread declines in wild bees and butterflies.
Effects on other creatures, though, were long thought to be minimal. Early toxicity tests suggested that risks to vertebrates were fairly small, and the compounds weren’t expected to accumulate in the environment at levels capable […]
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
TRAVIS GETTYS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: What apparently isn't widely known is how interlinked climate change deniers and the Theocratic Right have become. Here you see the apotheosis of the trend. This is beyond self-satire.
State officials urged Alabama residents to pray for divine intervention to block proposed environmental regulations for coal-fired plants, saying such policies violate God’s laws.
The commissioner-elect of the state’s Public Service Commission said coal was created in Alabama by God, so federal regulations limiting its use were an insult to God, reported Alabama.com.
‘Who has the right to take what God’s given a state?” said Chip Beeker, who on Monday joined two other commission members and an Alabama representative to the Republican National Committee to protest the proposed rules.
They called the proposed regulations, which would require Alabama to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired plants by 27 percent, ‘an assault on our way of life” by President Barack Obama.
‘We will not stand for what they are doing to our way of life in Alabama,” said Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh, PSC president. ‘We will take our fight to the EPA.”
She and several other GOP officials from Alabama will testify Tuesday at an EPA hearing in Atlanta.
Carbon emissions are among the biggest contributors to global warming.
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
Stephan: Further evidence of the Willful Ignorance Trend in operation. This is why I keep saying that only local communities and, in a few cases, regions are going to be able to accomplish anything in climate change remediation, and in the transition out of carbon energy. This will also obviously play a major role in the Great Schism Trend. It is going to become clear within the next decade that the cost of inaction is staggering. History will see Senator Jim Inhofe as a villainous fanatic, like Torquemada.
The U.S. Senate Monday failed to pass what should have been, maybe, the simplest resolution ever to come to the floor: an acknowledgement (an acknowledgement!) that climate change is a thing that is happening, and that it poses a risk to the United States.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who introduced the bill, insisted that she wasn’t even trying to offer solutions – she just wanted it acknowledged that “we know we have a problem.”
But Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), climate denier extraordinaire (climate change, he’s said, is ‘the greatest hoax ever”) went in for the block. According to the Times-Pacayune, he argued that ‘the science isn’t anywhere near as overwhelming as environmentalists maintain.” (Wrong.) ‘What we should be doing is learning from the international community,” Inhofe continued, citing Australia’s repeal of its carbon tax. Officials there, he maintained, recognized that the tax ‘cost jobs and hurt families without helping the environment.” (Wrong again.)
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Senate Democrats were frustrated, to say the least. ‘All we wanted to say in this resolution is climate change is happening,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), according to the Hill. ‘We can’t afford to sit around here debating whether climate change is real.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), accused Inhofe of […]
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
JAMES MORGAN, Science Reporter - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is a fascinating new development in physics.
Scientists have for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties – creating a “quantum Cheshire Cat”.
The phenomenon is named after the curious feline in Alice in Wonderland, who vanishes leaving only its grin.
Researchers took a beam of neutrons and separated them from their magnetic moment, like passengers and their baggage at airport security.
They describe their feat in Nature Communications.
The same separation trick could in principle be performed with any property of any quantum object, say researchers from Vienna University of Technology. Their technique could have a useful application in metrology – helping to filter out disturbances during high-precision measurements of quantum systems.
Schrodinger’s paradox
In Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s story, the Cheshire Cat gradually disappears, leaving only its mischievous grin.
This prompts Alice to exclaim: “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
The idea of a “quantum Cheshire Cat” was first proposed in 2010 by Dr Jeff Tollaksen from Chapman University, a co-author on this latest paper.
In the world familiar to us, an object and its properties are always bound together. A rotating ball, for instance, cannot become separated from […]
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