Stephan: Bill McKibben has written an essay that, I think, gives the best assessment of the Sharm El-Sheikh COP27 conference I have read. The main takeaway for me is that the leaders of the governments of the world just don't understand or are willing to do what needs to be done to deal with climate change. That guarantees we will live through massive misery, social upheaval, and death.
COP 27 sign in Egypt Credit: Euronews
I’ve actually been home from Egypt for a couple of days, so this final dispatch comes in part from talking to people still in the conference center at Sharm El-Sheikh where—with utter predictability—talks went into 24 hours of overtime before finally concluding in the early morning hours Sunday.
The talks produced one real success: civil society had focused on getting the rich nations to agree to a ‘loss and damage’ fund, and at the last minute they did just that. It was a triumph for movement organizers from the global south—for groups like the Climate Action Network—that made the issue the unrelenting focus of their efforts in the lead-up to this COP, and for good reason: as Reuters reported
55 vulnerable countries estimated their combined climate-linked losses over the last two decades totalled $525 billion, or 20% of their collective GDP. Some research suggests that by 2030 such losses could reach $580 billion per year.
Read those numbers again—they are astonishing (a fifth of GDP!) and there is no doubt where justice […]
Stephan: I was wondering what the effect of America's economic issue plus the pandemic, and declining birth rates would have on colleges. Here is an assessment.
Illustration by Violeta Encarnacion
In 2021, Shippensburg University won the NCAA Division II Field Hockey championship, completing an undefeated season with a 3-0 victory over archrival West Chester. The “Ship” Raiders also won it all in 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2013, which I know because I saw it written in big letters on a banner festooning the fieldhouse on Ship’s campus in south-central Pennsylvania when I visited last month.
Ship was in fine form. Young men and women wearing logoed Champion sweatshirts bustled between buildings. There was a line at the coffee shop in the student union. It was the kind of bright-blue autumn day that you would see on a brochure.
There was no way to tell, from the outside, that Ship was a shrinking institution. Or that the problem is about to get a lot worse — not just here, but at colleges and universities nationwide.
In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling […]
Stephan: This is what America's obsessive gun psychosis has produced. We are becoming a nation, particularly in Red states, of armed individuals. That inevitably will mean an increase of people wounded or murdered by gunfire, plus increased suicides by gun. Nearly 40,000 men, women, and children had died from gunfire in the United States so far this year, and the year is not over. If we get to 100,000 dead or wounded in a year do you think that will wake us up, or are we just going to become a country where everyone goes around carrying a gun? Let's also be clear that overwhelmingly those who are armed are conservative Republican Whites.
Credit: Ted S Warren / AP
An estimated 6 million American adults carried a loaded handgun with them daily in 2019, double the number who said they carried a gun every day in 2015, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
The new estimates highlight a decades-long shift in American gun ownership, with increasing percentages of gun owners saying they own firearms for self-defense, not hunting or recreation, and choosing to carry a gun with them when they go out in public, said Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, and the study’s lead author.
A landmark supreme court case this summer overturned a New York law that placed strict limits on public gun-carrying, ruling, for the first time, that Americans have a constitutional right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.
While recent surveys show that nearly a third of American adults say they personally own a gun, the percentage who choose to regularly carry a firearm in public is smaller, with about a […]
Stephan: Think about this: "Every day, more than 110 Americans die at the end of a gun. American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each," as this essay describes. This is the sickness, the cancer, that eats away at the wellbeing of America.
On Tuesday, a gunman allegedly killed six people and injured four at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. That came just days after a 22-year-old man allegedly killed five people and wounded 18 more at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And earlier this month, a shooter allegedly targeted members of the University of Virginia football team, killing three people and injuring two others as students traveled back to Charlottesville from a school trip to Washington, DC.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, more than 110 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 40,620 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average […]
Stephan: As I have been telling you viruses mutate, and here is a report on a just published South African study showing that we are far from through with Covid, and Covid is, in my opinion, just the first of a sequence of pandemics. As climate change worsens a range of viruses will mutate to cope with their changed circumstances, so we are going to see more Covids, not Covid itself, and a virus for which we have no real protection until a vaccine is developed, so every few years a pandemic is likely to occur, and we need to prepare for that.
A technician works on Covid-19 antibody neutralization testing at the African Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa. Credit: Bloomberg
A South African laboratory study using Covid-19 samples from an immunosuppressed individual over six months showed that the virus evolved to become more pathogenic, indicating that a new variant could cause more illness than the current predominant omicron strain.
The study, conducted by the same laboratory that was to first test the omicron strain against vaccines last year, used samples from a person infected with HIV. Over the six months the virus initially caused the same level of cell fusion and death as the omicron BA.1 strain, but as it evolved those levels rose to become similar to the first version of Covid-19 identified in Wuhan in China.
The study, led by Alex Sigal at the Africa Health Research Institute in the South African city of Durban, indicates that the Covid-19 pathogen could continue to mutate and a new variant may cause more severe illness and death than the relatively mild omicron strain. […]
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