JEFF MASTERS, Staff Writer - Yale Climate Connections
Stephan:
Jeff Masters is a meteorologist who has been studying the climate for 45 years. His assessment of what is coming as a result of climate change validates what I have been warning you about since the early 2000s when I began researching the scientific studies. We, as a country, are not taking this seriously enough because the oligarchs who control the industries that are creating climate change don’t want their profits diminished. They seem to think their wealth will protect them. As Masters describes it will not.
The words of explorer John Wesley Powell on the eve of his departure into the unexplored depths of the Grand Canyon in 1869 best describe how I see our path ahead as we brave the unknown rapids of climate change:
We are now ready to start our way down the Great Unknown. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.
Powell’s expedition made it through the canyon, but the explorers endured great hardship, suffering near-drownings, the destruction of two of their four boats, and the loss of much of their supplies. In the end, only six of the nine men survived.
Likewise, we find ourselves in an ever-deepening chasm of climate change impacts, forced to run a perilous course through dangerous […]
Our culture is changing in very unhappy ways as this report describes. I see the shoplifting trend and what it is doing to the shopping experience for millions of us as the result of our obscene wealth inequality. People shoplift not just because they are dishonest. They do it also because they are poor.
More stores are putting merchandise under lock and key to deter theft, which also makes it harder for consumers. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty
Locking up merchandise at drugstores and discount retailers hasn’t curbed retail theft but is driving frustrated consumers to shop online more, retail experts tell Axios.
Why it matters: Retail crime is eating into retailers’ profits and high theft rates are also leading to a rise in store closures.
Secured cases can cause sales to drop 15% to 25%, Joe Budano, CEO of anti-theft technology company Indyme, previously told Axios.
Barricading everything from razors to laundry detergent has largely backfired and broken shopping in America, Bloomberg reports.
The big picture: Aisles full of locked plexiglass cases are common at many CVS and Walgreens stores where consumers have to wait for an employee to unlock them.
Target, Walmart, Dollar General and other retailers have also pulled back on self-checkout to deter shoplifting.
“Locking up products worsens the shopping experience, and it makes things inconvenient and […]
I knew about medical deserts, and have written about them, and published many articles about them in SR. But until I read this ProPublica report I had never heard about Food Deserts, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as any low-income urban neighborhoods without a grocery store within a mile, and any rural communities without one within 10 miles. Food deserts, yet another example of the grotesque wealth inequality in the United States. How is it that other developed democracies can feed, provide healthcare, and educate their citizens, yet we cannot seem to do that? We have 2,781 billionaires and more than 5.5 million Americans with liquid investible assets of more than $1 million, up 62% over the past decade. Then there are 37.9 million people in poverty, which is 11.5% of Americans.
Board members and other stakeholders raise signs reading, “We are no longer a food desert,” at the grand opening of Rise Community Market in Cairo, Illinois, in June 2023. Credit: ProPublica
CAIRO, ILLINOIS. — More than 100 people congregated in the parking lot of Rise Community Market on its opening day a little over a year ago. As they listened to celebratory speeches, the audience erupted into joyful exclamations: “Mercy!” “Wonderful!” “Wow!” “All right!” Colorful homemade signs raised by local leaders beckoned the crowd to join in: “We!” “Are!” “No!” “Longer!” “A!” “Food!” “Desert!”
For most American cities, the opening of a new grocery store barely warrants a mention. But in Cairo, the government seat of Illinois’ poorest county and the fastest-shrinking one in America, business openings are rare. And for residents who for years had to travel long distances to buy food, it was a magical moment.
“Access to healthy foods and fresh produce is not just about groceries. It’s about justice,” declared Juliana Stratton, Illinois’ lieutenant governor, to the cheering crowd that gathered in Illinois’ southernmost city.
Cairo, she said, had set the stage for what was to come as Illinois embarked on its new grocery store […]
Yet another tale of human stupidity and greed. Until we get universal agreement that climate change must be stopped and that methane production must end, we are not going to deal with climate change productively, as this report describes. Climate change is not just a national problem, it is a planetary problem that must be addressed as a planetary problem, but the governments of humanity can’t seem to understand that, nor do they seem to be capable of developing the courage and discipline to overcome the greed that dooms us.
An aerial view of a fire in the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil, which experienced a severe drought last year. Credit: Michael Dantas / AFP / Getty
Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within a decade or two would save us 0.5C of warming. No other greenhouse gas gives us this much power to slow the climate crisis.
If the Earth keeps warming, though, reducing emissions from human activities may not be enough. We may also need to counter higher methane emissions in nature, including from warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost. The highest natural methane emissions come from wetlands and seasonally flooded forests in the tropics […]
What can be more essential to wellbeing than clean water. Yet nearly half the human population it seems does not have access to clean water. If you think this is true only of third world developing countries I am sorry to tell you that you are mistaken. More than 2 million people lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, including at least 1.4 million people who don’t have indoor plumbing.
Citation for the scientific paper: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02621-0
Approximately 4.4 billion people drink unsafe water — double the previous estimate — according to a study published today in Science1. The finding, which suggests that more than half of the world’s population is without clean and accessible water, puts a spotlight on gaps in basic health data and raises questions about which estimate better reflects reality.
That this many people don’t have access is “unacceptable”, says Esther Greenwood, a water researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf and an author on the Science paper. “There’s an urgent need for the situation to change.”
The United Nations has been tracking access to safely managed drinking water, recognized as a human right, since 2015. Before this, the UN reported only whether global drinking-water sources were ‘improved’, meaning they were probably protected from outside contamination with infrastructure such as backyard wells, connected pipes and rainwater-collection systems. According to this benchmark, it seemed that 90% of the global population had its drinking water in order. But there was little information on whether the water itself was clean, and, almost a decade […]
