Tuesday, December 20th, 2016
Kacey Deamer, - Live Science
Stephan: Sea rise is becoming an increasing concern to coastal towns and cities. Consider the reports opening sentence, "About one-quarter of the world's population lives in coastal areas that will be unlivable by the year 2100 because of rising sea levels, researchers say. " Think about what that means in terms of migrations. Think about what it means in terms of seaport, corporate, civic, and residential property; what each of those crashes represent. The effect on individual and social wellbeing, with and without preparation and planning.
Given the appointments in the incoming administration, and the quality of the Congress it seems to me almost assured that except at the local level and in some Blue states, particularly California, we are about to lose four precious years for preparation and remediation. Civic things take a long time to come together, and we can ill afford that loss.
Heavy waves caused by Hurricane Matthew battered boat docks in Cocoa Beach, Florida, on Oct. 7, 2016.
Credit: Mark Wilson
SAN FRANCISCO — About one-quarter of the world’s population lives in coastal areas that will be unlivable by the year 2100 because of rising sea levels, researchers say. (emphasis added)
In a special issue of the journal Earth’s Future, coastal scientists and engineers detailed projections for sea-level rise for the year 2100, and described their model Monday (Dec. 12) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Sea-level rise is a global phenomenon, with more than 130 cities with populations of 1 million people or more along vulnerable coasts, said Robert Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton in the U.K. [Images of Melt: Earth’s Vanishing Ice]
“To really understand how this might be impacted by sea-level rise, or other kinds of change, we need to understand all of the different scales and how they interact,” Nicholls said. “That’s what we’ve been doing in this big project.”
The Earth’s […]
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Tuesday, December 20th, 2016
Tanay Warerkar , Reporter - Curbed
Stephan: Rise rise is getting very personal.
Jamaica Bay, one of the areas of New York City that’s on the frontlines of climate change
Credit: Nathan Kensinger/Curbed
The fact that rising sea levels will adversely impact New Yorkers is not surprising, but the alarming rate at which it might do so has been brought to the fore in a new report [PDF!] prepared by the Regional Plan Association, CityLab first reported.
Under Water How Sea Level Rise Threatens the Tri-State Region suggests that sea levels could rise by as much as one foot by 2050, with some estimates placing it even sooner at 2030. The RPA has created three scenarios analyzing how this region will be impacted with a sea rise of one, three, or six feet.
In New York City, our coastal neighborhoods will be the most affected. With a one-foot rise, the Rockaways, Jamaica Bay, parts of Coney Island, and the eastern shore of Staten Island will be impacted. At three-feet, which is anticipated around 2080, Broad Channel, Arverne, Edgemere and Howard Beach will all […]
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Tuesday, December 20th, 2016
Justin Bergman, - BBC (U.K.)
Stephan: The Influx of well to do Chinese is going to be a very interesting trend to watch. In Seattle the influx of Chinese such as those described in this article is already having a major effect on increasing real estate values, as it did in Vancouver BC. But there are other implications. It is going to make the cultures of Australia, Canada, and the U.S. more diverst, more Chinese, just at a time when China is poised to play a much bigger role on the world stage, as the U.S. is diminished by self-sabotage.
Melbourne city at night Credit: BBC
When Mika Sun started looking for a retirement house for his parents, he had a few non-negotiable requirements.
Decent healthcare was a must, as was a safe community and a pristine environment. It also had to be a good investment, at a price Sun — a 35-year-old network engineer at a telecommunications firm in Shanghai — could afford.
This retirement dream of palm trees and sunny skies wasn’t in China, though. Like many well-travelled Chinese, Sun found what he was looking for overseas — specifically, in Irvine, California, a city 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the US. He recently bought a townhouse there for his parents, and in a few years when he’s secured a US visa, he plans to move there for work and his parents will follow.
Well-to-do Chinese are increasingly investing in retirement properties overseas – both for their parents and their own golden years
Sun’s parents, who are both in their 60s, might even find it easy to acclimatise to their new, foreign home. As […]
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Monday, December 19th, 2016
Jennifer Calfas, - The Hill
Stephan: How disconnected from a factual reality is much of the Republican electorate, you may ask. Here's the answer; a majority of Republican voters think Trump won the popular vote, not that Clinton got over 2.8 million more votes than Trump. This is what Goebbels meant when he said that people submerged in propaganda are easy to manipulate. One of the hallmarks of Republican voters is that they get "news" principally from FOX News, Breitbart, Daily Caller, and other such disinformation sites. And when you have this large a portion of any democratic nation's electorate this misinformed its democracy is in peril.
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Republican voters
Credit: USA Today
A majority of Republicans incorrectly believes President-elect Donald Trump won the popular vote, according to a new poll.
Fifty-two percent of Republicans in the Qualtrics poll say they think Trump won the popular vote, (emphasis added) The Washington Post reported. Only 7 percent of Democrats say the same thing. Of all respondents, 29 percent say they believe Trump leads the popular vote.
A similar survey conducted by Pew Research found that 19 percent of respondents believe Trump won the popular vote.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton currently has more than 2.8 million more votes than Trump.
While Trump did not win the popular vote, he topped Clinton in electoral votes, 306 to 232. The members of the Electoral College will meet on Monday, almost assuredly to seal Trump’s win.
Since Clinton won the popular vote, some Democrats have rallied behind an effort to abolish the Electoral College. Democratic candidates for president have lost the Electoral College while still winning the popular vote two times over the last 16 […]
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Monday, December 19th, 2016
Stephan: This morning I saw four stories in the local media around the U.S. about Trump supporters threatening people with guns. Facts are so inconvenient when they contradict prejudice; which, I guess, is why so many people ignore them for comforting fantasies. But that doesn't make them go away, and here is some truth about America's deadly social disease; gun deaths and injuries.
Whether or not you like guns, the facts don’t lie: The United States has a huge problem with gun crime. A study published in The American Journal of Medicine, based on data collected by the World Health Organization in 2010, shows that Americans are 10 times more likely than citizens of any other high-income country to be killed by gunfire, whether murder, accident or suicide.
The study found the United States’ gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than the rest of the comparable countries, (emphasis added) while the overall homicide rate is seven times higher. And it’s much worse for certain groups. For 15- to 24-year-olds, the gun homicide rate is nearly 50 times higher.
More than 90 percent of the women, children and young adults killed by guns in high-income countries were Americans.
While the suicide rate in the U.S. is average, the gun-related suicide rate is eight times higher. In 2012 (the most recent year for which there is solid data), 32,288 people died from gunshot wounds in the United States. According to […]
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