Friday, November 30th, 2018
Doyle Rice, - wkyc 3 (NBC)
Stephan: It's pretty clear that nothing by way of serious climate change remediation is going to happen in the United States, or much of the rest of the world because short-term greed simply trumps all other considerations. My takeaway from this conclusion is that local communities and individuals are going to have to prepare for it themselves.
This is easier to say than do. Even here on the island where the community has a long tradition of social activism, it is proving very difficult to get people off their asses to do the work that needs to be done. As a result, I think Puerto Rico, the Virgins, Houston, Florence, and California are the new normal, and I urge my readers to begin to plan seriously for what their community, and they, themselves can do to maintain their quality of life. The alternative is disaster, and sleeping under a tinfoil emergency blanket on the floor of the gym with nothing left to you but the clothes on your back.
A view of the smoke stack of the 47-year old Cheswick coal-fired power plant in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Local residents complain about the amount of sulphur-dioxide, nitrogen oxide and coal particles originating from the NRG-owned 565-MW power plant that have effected their health and respiratory system. (
Credit: by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty
Humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels shows few signs of letting up.
After three years of decline, the amount of carbon dioxide humans emitted increased in 2017, the United Nations announced in a report issued Tuesday.
Although “humanity is starting to tackle its fossil fuel addiction … we’re not making the change (to renewable energy) nearly as quickly as we need to,” said Joyce Msuya, the deputy executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, which released the report.
More troublesome, it said any hope of keeping global carbon emission levels under control in the decades ahead – to try to rein in runaway climate change – seems to be dwindling.
The U.N. warning comes four days after a massive report issued by the Trump administration – but disputed by the president himself – that emphasized the dire threat human-caused global warming poses […]
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Friday, November 30th, 2018
Emily Holden, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Water is destiny. I have been saying this for 15 years, often to skepticism and ridicule. Sadly, it is true, and it is going to change the lives of several billion people across the globe, either too much water, or not enough water. If you are smart you will look at the water situation not just now but 10, 15, 20 years from now.
The Trump administration published a major report on climate change the day after Thanksgiving. We will explore the key findings each day this week.
Donald Trump doesn’t believe his own government’s major report on climate change – which the administration tried to bury over the Thanksgiving break. It warns that rising temperatures are already harming America and will cause huge damage globally.
Critical water supplies will become harder to maintain
Water will become increasingly difficult to manage in the face of climate change. Government planners are already having a harder time supplying clean water to America’s general population, farmers and ecosystems, as aquifers are being depleted in many regions of the US.
And with climate change and rising temperatures, they will be battling an even deeper worsening of droughts and more flooding from intense rainfall events.
In 2011, flooding on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers caused $5.7bn in damages. But a year later, drought conditions in many of the same areas cost the US $33bn and devastated crop harvests.
In California, a drought from 2011 to 2016 was followed by heavy rainfall that caused record flooding, landslides and erosion.
Those pendulum swings could become the normal […]
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Friday, November 30th, 2018
Stephan: In my view, the Murdoch family, and the Fox disinformation operation they run constitute one of the main influences destroying American democracy. These are greedy evil people and I ask all my readers to write to the companies that advertise on Fox telling them that you will not buy or use their products because they advertise on Fox. I assure you that 10,000 letters, actual letters on paper put in the mail, will have a big effect.
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Friday, November 30th, 2018
Kiley Crossland , Assistant Editor - World
Stephan: It has been coming for years, decades really. My late friend Peter Tompkins was doing research on the financial rot at the core of the Roman Catholic Church, back in the 1970s. But it is the unending stories of sexual dysfunction, deviancy, and molestation, I think, that have finally pushed the Catholic church over the edge of the abyss. Membership is dropping like a falling rock in the developed nations of the world, and the financial drain of settlements worldwide is running into billions. Now there is also a schism developing between the pope and the upper ranks of the clergy.
I think we are watching the slow-motion collapse of the Roman church we have known for centuries.
Protesters outside the U.S. Bishops’ conference on 13 November 2018.
The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is reeling after the Vatican last week abruptly directed its bishops to postpone plans to increase accountability in the clergy sex abuse crisis. A chorus of Catholic critics is calling the move another cover-up of abuse by the Catholic hierarchy.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was set to vote on two measures—one on a code of conduct for bishops and another on a lay-led special commission to review complaints against them—during last week’s annual assembly in Baltimore. But during the meeting’s opening few minutes, the conference president, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, told the bishops he had received an order from the Vatican the night before to suspend the vote.
“The Holy See has asked that we delay voting on these so that our deliberations can inform and be informed by the global meeting of the conference presidents that the Holy Father has called for February 2019,” DiNardo told the gathering. Earlier this year, Pope Francis summoned the presidents of […]
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Thursday, November 29th, 2018
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and Ope-ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: Paul Krugman has figured it out and his essay describes the moral depravity of the Trump administration and the Congressional Republicans. History will condemn these men and women for their vile willful ignorance, and their role in the destruction of human civilization, but it will be too late.
Ruins as a result of the Paradise, California fire.
Credit: John Locher/Associated Press
The Trump administration is, it goes without saying, deeply anti-science. In fact, it’s anti-objective reality. But its control of the government remains limited; it didn’t extend far enough to prevent the release of the latest National Climate Assessment, which details current and expected future impacts of global warming on the United States.
True, the report was released on Black Friday, clearly in the hope that it would get lost in the shuffle. The good news is that the ploy didn’t work.
The assessment basically confirms, with a great deal of additional detail, what anyone following climate science already knew: Climate change poses a major threat to the nation, and some of its adverse effects are already being felt. For example, the report, written before the latest California disaster, highlights the growing risks of wildfirein the Southwest; global warming, not failure to
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