Stephan: Although climate change denierism is the official position of the Trump administration, and most of the Republican congress, it is a worldview very much akin to flat earthism, or Biblical inerrancy. Deeply, even passionately believed, but devoid of any intellectual or factual validity.
The debate, such as it is, has gone from being a false equivalency argument, in which the anti side had at least some credibility, but not an equivalent amount, to a level of farce. Here are some facts.
Credit: Skeptical Science
On Tuesday afternoon, as Southern Floridians nervously watched Hurricane Irma become a Category 5 monster, they received an odd message from popular right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh: The hurricane forecasts are not to be trusted.
In “official meteorological circles,” he said, “they believe that Al Gore is correct” about climate change. They “desire to advance this climate change agenda,” he warned, “and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it.” So these meteorologists, he argued, create needless fear and panic.
What’s more,local TV stations are hyping the hurricane to drum up bottled-water sales for local businesses. (Seriously.) For Limbaugh, the hurricane conspiracy goes deep.
If you can put aside how irresponsible it is to send that kind of message to a group of people in real and serious danger (uh, extremely irresponsible), it’s almost funny. This is what conservative climate denial has come to. Even with one climate-amplified hurricane barely in the rearview mirror, another barreling down, and much of the Western half of the country on fire, the […]
Aristos Georgiou, Reporter - Reader Supported News/International Business Times
Stephan: We are running out of time, some scientists think we have already run out of time, to reduce -- it can no longer be eliminated -- the effects of climate change. But human greed is such I don't think we are going to do what is needed. Deforestation is a classic example of the process that is destroying our environment. This report lays out the situation pretty well. Will we stop? What do you think?
In the fight against climate change, much of the focus rests on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and developing alternative energy sources. However, the results of a new study suggest that far more attention should be paid to deforestation and how the land is used subsequently – the effects of which make a bigger contribution to climate change than previously thought. (emphasis added)
The research, conducted by Cornell University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters,shows just how much this impact has been underestimated. Even if all fossil fuel emissions are eradicated, if current rates of deforestation in the tropics continue through to 2100 then there will still be a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperature.
Most scientists believe that a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels will bring dangerous disruption to the world’s climate. Indeed, many already think this target may be unattainable.
“A lot of the emphasis of climate policy is on converting to sustainable energy from fossil fuels”, said Natalie M. Mahowald, the paper’s lead author. “It’s an incredibly important step to take, but, ironically, particulates released from the burning of fossil fuels – which are severely detrimental to human health – […]
Stephan: A tiny group of corporate and individual interests became incredibly enriched and, when they discovered that what they were doing was toxic, instead of moving to alternatives they suppressed the information. Tobacco and sugar repeated and writ large. This is what happens when profit is the only societal priority.
Sea level rises of just eight inches produce devastating flooding effects from storms. Credit: John G Wilbanks/Alamy
The impacts of global warming are here and they are costly. Sea level rise floods towns and erodes shorelines. Frequent and intense heatwaves threaten our workers’ health and damage our infrastructure. Extreme weather ruins our crops and corrodes businesses, factories and homes. In New York City alone, officials estimate that it will cost $19.5 billion dollars to prepare the city for sea level rise. And globally, climate adaptation costs are staggering.
Will top fossil fuel producers help shoulder the costs? They should.
As early as 1977, investor-owned fossil fuel companies knew their business was risky—that the use of their products released dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide and methane emissions that could destabilize our climate.
These companies could have taken steps to reduce the risks. Instead, they chose to misinform the public and their investors, block action to limit carbon emissions and carried on with […]
LYDIA O'NEAL AND DAVID SIROTA, Contributing Writer - Newsweek
Stephan: Privatization is a classic fascist move, and what the Trump job scheme is about, as this report describes.
This is what Pence tried to do in Indiana. Like Sam Brownback's schemes it became a disaster. Because fascist economics are grounded in profit and not wellbeing, they are all and always societally inferior.
The report also brings into closer focus an often overlooked reality: Mike Pence is equally as bad as Trump, just different. He's in the Scott Walker, Sam Brownback, Chris Christie, Rick Scott school of governance, which is to say profit for the few over wellbeing for the many. And if Pence is impeached as the evidence increasing indicates he should be, that would leave us with Paul Ryan, who is so far out of his depth, it has become embarrassing.
Solving the problem of returning to good governance is a complicated effort that will take time, just as it took time to get here. You'll be able to tell we are on the right track when we commit to wellbeing as the societal priority.
Mike Pence as governor. Credit: AJ Mast/AP
President Donald Trump’s $1 trillion plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure may be unprecedented in size and ambition, but it mimics a controversial scheme championed by Vice President Mike Pence when he was the governor of Indiana. That’s why Pence is the public face of the Trump initiative, and executives from financial firms that helped privatize Indiana’s toll road are in the White House, busily sculpting Trump’s national plan.
Pence and his allies like to boast about how Indiana sold control of major roads to private firms, claiming the move prompted corporations to invest money in infrastructure that would otherwise have been funded by taxpayers. But opponents say Indiana made some bad deals that offer a cautionary tale of get-rich-quick scheming, secrecy and cronyism that led the state to sell off valuable assets that were then wildly mismanaged.
Public-private partnerships involve private companies investing in, constructing or maintaining public assets such as roads, bridges and airports—in exchange for those companies raking […]
Stephan: Here is some very interesting new research. If it stands up and I think it will it give science a more nuanced way of measuring consciousness, and I can see several applications for that. Fascinating.
The Emoji Movie,” in which the protagonist can’t help but express a wide variety of emotions instead of the one assigned to him, may have gotten something right. A new UC Berkeley study challenges a long-held assumption in psychology that most human emotions fall within the universal categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust.
To view hundreds of video clips, click on image above to get to the interactive map and move cursor over the map’s colored letters. Credit: Courtesy Alan Cowen
Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than 800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re connected.
“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and expert on the science of emotions.
