Stephan: As I listen to the news and see the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ida, what is coming with climate change commands my thoughts. We are utterly unprepared for what is happening now, let alone what will be happening in the years to come. I have begun to see interviews in which people say they have decided to leave where they have lived for years, even decades, because of what has happened. As I have warned my readers for years now, water is destiny, and tens of millions of Americans are going to become climate refugees either because there is not enough water, or there is too much.
Illustration by Dan Page
Picture a plastic bowl. Put a large piece of ice in it—one tall enough that it rises high above the bowl’s rim. Now melt the ice. The bowl will catch most of the water, but not all of it. Since the ice is tall, the bowl will reach full capacity before the block melts completely. With no place else to go, the extra water will spill over the lip and onto the counter.
This is an approximation of how climate scientists have long modeled the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), an expanse of ice roughly the size of Mexico currently melting in a bowl-shaped stretch of bedrock below sea level. Should the two-million-square-kilometer ice sheet fully collapse, some water would stay in the geological bowl. The rest would flow into the open ocean, where scientists previously estimated it would raise global mean sea level by a little more than three meters within 1,000 years of the collapse. But three meters substantially underestimates the problem, according to a recent study by earth and planetary sciences doctoral students […]
Stephan: The corruption of the U.S. Congress is breathtaking, and no one illustrates this better than the Democratic senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, winner of today's Democratic Scum Award. For heaven's sake, West Virginia voters, vote this man out of office; he is harming your lives and the lives of everyone else in American.
West Virginia Democratic Senator, winner of the Democrat Scum Award
In the early hours of August 11, the Senate voted to approve a $3.5 trillion budget resolution that would mark the nation’s most significant investment in the fight against climate change ever undertaken in the United States. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., cast the tie-breaking vote.
The resolution’s approval kicked off a legislative process likely to last months, all of it hinging on Manchin’s continued support. Not long after casting his vote, he issued a public statement warning the bill’s backers not to take him for granted.
“Adding trillions of dollars more to nearly $29 trillion of national debt, without any consideration of the negative effects on our children and grandchildren, is one of those decisions that has become far too easy in Washington,” Manchin said. The month prior, he had specified that some of the climate-related provisions were “very, very disturbing.”
“If you’re sticking your head in the sand, and saying that fossil [fuel] has to be eliminated in America, and they want to get rid of it, and thinking that’s going to clean […]
Stephan: It doesn't happen very often, I think the last time was three years ago, but I do occasionally misjudge an article or a source. When that happens and someone can send me a fact-based analysis of the mistake I immediately publish a correction. Such is the case with the report I published the other day about a changing trend in higher education in The United States. It came from Washington Monthly, a publication founded back in the early 1970s by a friend, Charles Peters. Over the years the publication earned a reputation for being well-researched and fact-based but, apparently, not this time.
An SR reader sent the SR piece to a friend of hers, a well-known social policies commentator -- I have not written to ask him for permission to use his name, and so will not -- who responded with the following. I dug deeper myself and found he was correct, so I quote his comments in full.
"I tracked down the survey and reviewed the questions and the crosstabs. As we all know, survey outcomes can be heavily influenced by phrasing, order of questions, etc. This one is no different. It's designed to reflect the Charles Koch Foundation's agenda against public higher education (someone Charles Koch first wrote about in 1971! I reviewed archival material about him years ago.). The questions are skewed against public higher education -- i.e. (I'm paraphrasing) "Should colleges be built around the needs of students or keep doing things the way they've done them for centuries"? And all the questions are about jobs, not having colleges and universities doing work that benefits society.
"They got the responses they wanted -- with one exception. Of the people who attended college, 60 percent said they were glad they had and don't wish they'd used one of the Koch-preferred options (e.g. employer-sponsored online training.)
"The write-up in Washington Monthly is also quite flawed. There's no evidence Americans are growing increasingly skeptical, since they don't offer any polling from the past. There's no way to know if these results are worse, better, or the same than they would have been 10 years ago. There may well be increasing skepticism about four-year colleges, but right now that's nothing more than a guess."
As to this last, I found a Columbia University study from 2018, How Americans View Education, Health & Psychology, which supports this criticism. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8V7129F
Stephan: Each year it becomes a little clearer that the way humans in high technology cultures live on the earth cannot continue. We are destroying the earth's ecosystem, and the impact on our own wellbeing is going to be enormous and negative. I see almost no one in public office talking about this, but it is going to shape your life, and the lives of your children and grandchildren in a wide array of ways, none of them good.
Are you planting your landscaping and gardens to support bees, butterflies, and birds? If not you better get up to speed on what is needed to be a supporter of the earth's, and your own, wellbeing.
Nighttime in Primrose Hill Park, London, England. Credit: stockinasia / iStock / Getty
Scientists have grown increasingly alarmed about the decline in insect populations worldwide. While some causes — like pesticide use, habitat loss and the climate crisis — are clear, other potential factors, like artificial light at night (ALAN), are more nebulous.
Now, researchers writing in Science Advances Wednesday told BBC News they have found the strongest evidence yet that nighttime lights really are leading to the decline of local insect populations. In some of the areas they studied, the presence of light decreased moth caterpillar populations by nearly 50 percent.
“We were really quite taken aback by just how stark it was,” lead study author Douglas Boyes from UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology told AFP.
Previous studies have shown that ALAN can have numerous negative impacts on insects, including increasing their risk of being eaten by predators and disrupting their reproduction and pollination, the study authors noted.
“Yet,” they continued, “it remains unclear whether the effects of ALAN are predominately disruptive impacts on […]
Stephan: I am increasingly worried about the rise of armed militias. It will inevitably lead to violence because the kind of people who feel they are only safe when they are carrying a weapon are also the people with poor anger control and a proclivity for violence.
Credit: Mother Jones illustration/Getty
On a dry, bright afternoon in late June, members of the Bedford Militia lined up on a grassy lot on the property of Bryan Buchanan Auto Auction, right off the county highway in Montvale, Virginia. The group of about a few dozen stood in formation still as water, a US flag on one side and the squad’s guidon bearer holding up the militia’s flag on the other, the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. All were dressed in military fatigues and about half had a sidearm strapped to their hip. Bob Good, a Republican serving his first term in the US House representing the region, was on stage getting fired up, discussing his efforts on Capitol Hill to defend the Constitution, by which he meant the Second Amendment.
Good warned the audience that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party would not rest until they took away every gun in the country and forced critical race theory—the latest Republican boogeyman—into every classroom. The only thing preventing this leftist fever dream from becoming reality was the militia […]
