Group items tagged

During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax. Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe. More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.

By combining a hurricane model and coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model to investigate the early Pliocene, Emanuel, Brierley and co-author Alexey Fedorov observed how vertical ocean mixing by hurricanes near the equator caused shallow parcels of water to heat up and later resurface in the eastern equatorial Pacific as part of the ocean wind-driven circulation. The researchers conclude from this pattern that frequent hurricanes in the central Pacific likely strengthened the warm pool in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which in turn increased hurricane frequency — an interaction described by Emanuel as a “two-way feedback process.”�The researchers believe that in addition to creating more hurricanes, the intense hurricane activity likely created a permanent El Nino like state in which very warm water in the eastern Pacific near the equator extended to higher latitudes. The El Nino weather pattern, which is caused when warm water replaces cold water in the Pacific, can impact the global climate by intermittently altering atmospheric circulation, temperature and precipitation patterns.The research suggests that Earth’s climate system may have at least two states — the one we currently live in that has relatively few tropical cyclones and relatively cold water, including in the eastern part of the Pacific, and the one during the Pliocene that featured warm sea surface temperatures, permanent El Nino conditions and high tropical cyclone activity.Although the paper does not suggest a direct link with current climate models, Fedorov said it is possible that future global warming could cause Earth to transition into a different equilibrium state that has more hurricanes and permanent El Nino conditions. “So far, there is no evidence in our simulations that this transition is going to occur at least in the next century. However, it’s still possible that the condition can occur in the future.”�Whether our future world is characterized by a mean state that is more El Nino-like remains one of the most important unanswered questions in climate dynamics, according to Matt Huber, a professor in Purdue University’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The Pliocene was a warmer time than now with high carbon dioxide levels. The present study found that hurricanes influenced by weakened atmospheric circulation — possibly related to high levels of carbon dioxide — contributed to very warm temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which in turn led to more frequent and intense hurricanes. The research indicates that Earth’s climate may have multiple states based on this feedback cycle, meaning that the climate could change qualitatively in response to the effects of global warming.

Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try.

It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.

The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation. The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.