Wednesday, December 20th, 2017
Stephan: The Arctic will never be frozen again. That ought to scare the bejeesus out of you, because the Arctic regulates the earth's climate in profound ways. What concerns me is that when I run these stories on climate change my readership goes way down. I don't publish SR on a popularity basis; I try to follow the trends as they are, not as I might want them to be. But if people are getting tired of reading about climate change, aren't paying much attention to it, and it is just becoming background noise requiring no particular awareness, then there isn't going to be much citizen pressure to change anything. That really worries me.
SVALBARD AND JAN MAYEN ISLANDS – 2015/07/20: A walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) is resting on an ice floe in the pack ice north of Svalbard, Norway.
Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket
Last week, at a New Orleans conference center that once doubled as a storm shelter for thousands during Hurricane Katrina, a group of polar scientists made a startling declaration: The Arctic as we once knew it is no more.
The region is now definitively trending toward an ice-free state, the scientists said, with wide-ranging ramifications for ecosystems, national security, and the stability of the global climate system. It was a fitting venue for an eye-opening reminder that, on its current path, civilization is engaged in an existential gamble with the planet’s life-support system.
In an accompanying annual report on the Arctic’s health — titled “Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades” — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees all official U.S. research in the region, coined a term: “New Arctic.”
Until roughly a decade or so ago, the region […]
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Wednesday, December 20th, 2017
David Dayen, - The intercept
Stephan: I heard a Republican Senator today say on CNN that history has been clear that "trickle down" economics has been proven to work. It was as blatant a lie as I have heard out of the mouth of a Republican, and I, like you, have heard some real whoopers.
If you think CEOs are just waiting to take the swag they're going to get from this obscene tax bill and start paying their employees more, and hire more people, well here's what the CEOs themselves are actually doing. Sorry.
Credit: The Intercept
U.S. CORPORATIONS ARE already beginning the process of pocketing the winnings from the tax bill jackpot they expect to hit any day now, undercutting, in a remarkably public fashion, the pretense that the corporate tax cut will lead to greater investment in job creation.
Since the Senate passed its version of the tax bill on December 2, 29 companies have announced $70.2 billion in stock buybacks, a maneuver that uses company cash to buy its own shares, which then drives up the price of those shares, rewarding major investors and executives whose compensation is directly tied to the company’s stock price.
The figure comes from a new report by Senate Democrats, which relies on the public statements of company executives. Stock buybacks, meanwhile, had been declining. There were $120 billion in buybacks in the entire second quarter of 2017, among all companies. The new figure — $70.2 billion in just 10 days, from just 29 companies — suggests that a surge of buybacks is in the offing if the tax […]
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Wednesday, December 20th, 2017
Stephan: Starting about 10 years ago I began telling my readers that the big social tipping point on climate change would come when the insurance industry stopped being willing to insure coastal properties. Here is an assessment of where things stand today.
2017 will be remembered as the year the water came.
Hurricane Harvey dropped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Houston, shattering American meteorological records. Hurricane Irma was the strongest tropical storm ever recorded outside the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and plowed through Florida in early
And Category 4 Hurricane Maria pulverized Puerto Rico with 150-mph winds, leaving the island in darkness and ruin. Altogether, the three storms will costthe U.S. more than $200 billion, which would make 2017 the most expensive hurricane season on record.
Yet there is every reason to expect that the towns and the cities hit by the hurricanes of 2017 will be rebuilt–even, eventually, devastated Puerto Rico. Thank the federal government–when a storm or flood strikes a community, Washington is there with generous disaster relief, either through billions of dollars in direct aid or through the cushion of federally-subsidized flood insurance plans.
The confidence in the federal government’s backing keeps lenders sending money to disaster-hit communities, which encourages residents to stay put and rebuild, rather than flee for safer areas. This in […]
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Wednesday, December 20th, 2017
Stephan: America's illness profit system, what we have instead of healthcare in the U.S., is now even more oriented to profit than it was before. I see this as another datapoint in the transformation of the United States from a democracy to an fascist oligarchy.
Illustration: Kevin Hong
Angelia Fowler was surprised to learn that the debt-collection agency she says is ruining her life is owned by the hospital company that saved it.
Fowler had been sick for months in November 2015 when her son finally took her to the emergency room with what turned out to be pneumonia. She spent much of the next month in a coma in intensive care at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The bill arrived in January. After discounts, the hospital wanted her to pay $80,770. Other bills from specialists boosted the sum she owed above six figures, enough to buy a condo in West Palm Beach. It was a sum she couldn’t pay.
Millions of patients like Fowler are on the receiving end of the health-care industry’s collections machine. The amount of past-due medical debt in the U.S. is about $75 […]
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Tuesday, December 19th, 2017
NICHOLAS KUSNETZ, Reporter - Inside Climate News
Stephan: I have been telling you for years now that the two constants of climate change are that the timeline is collapsing, everything is happening sooner than originally predicted; and the changes are going to be worse and more disruptive than originally projected. And that is exactly what is happening. I don't think people have any idea what is coming, or how bad it is going to be. Or how criminally negligent the Trump administration is in supporting the continuation of carbon energy.
“These are not just new odds. These are new weather extremes that are made possible by a new climate,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Credit: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP
The devastating heat wave that hit Asia in 2016 and the unprecedented warmth of ocean waters off of Alaska that year had something in common: neither would have been possible without the excess carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the past century, according to new research.
That year was the warmest on record globally, and that extreme also would have been impossible without climate change, the report said.
The findings marked an ominous first for the American Meteorological Society’s annual report on the role of climate change in extreme weather events, which was released Wednesday. While five previous editions included research showing that climate change made dozens of heat waves, droughts and storms more likely or more severe, none had determined that the events could not have occurred under […]
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