Group items tagged

Sea level rise is going to be an ongoing problem for centuries to come, we will have to keep on adapting over and over again. It’s going to be a whole new expensive lifestyle, costing trillions of dollars.

Sea level has a very long memory, so even if we start cooling temperatures the seas will continue to rise.

About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters – the US, China, India, Russia and the European Union – according to the researchers. The US was a key architect of the Paris deal but this week Donald Trump formally triggered its exit from the agreement.

Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimetres is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we’ve observed over the entire 20th century,

The results reveal the daunting prospect of a near-endless advance of the seas, forcing countries to invest huge resources in defending key infrastructure or ceding certain areas to the tides. Many coastal cities around the world are already facing this challenge, with recent research finding that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 unless carbon emissions are drastically slashed.

the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed.

“People are going to become less inclined to live by the coast and there are going to be sea level rise refugees,” Clark said. “More severe cuts in emissions are certainly going to be required but the current Paris pledges aren’t enough to prevent the seas from rising for a long, long time.”

An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine. Called the “atmospheric steam engine,” Newcomen’s invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts. 

Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.

In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along Britain’s rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone’s system would be used for railroad signalling, as the speed of the new trains had created a need for more sophisticated means of communication.

Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water.

The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright’s designs across the Atlantic. He later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the “Father of the American Industrial Revolution.”

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems. By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America’s northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world’s leading industrial nation.

“America and Britain’s poor responses to Covid-19 can be traced partly to post-cold war self-congratulation — the belief that neither had much to learn from the rest of the world,” wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times. “In a few short months a microbe has exposed the underside to Anglo-American hubris.”

that hubris is no small thing — it’s in many ways at the heart of the ideological project that sculpted the post-World War II international order, the “Anglo-Saxon” principles of laissez-faire liberal democracy that seemed irrevocably ascendant until not so long ago.

“Half a millennium of potted history tells Anglo-Americans they are destined always to be on the winning side,” Luce added. “It blinds both to how the rest of the world increasingly views them, which is with sadness and growing mockery.”

instead of setting the terms of a hemispheric “Pax Americana,” they find themselves adjusting to new realities forged elsewhere.

In the age of the coronavirus, Asia’s dramas have become global ones. A deadly standoff between Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas heralded the advent of a new 21st-century fault line separating two nuclear powers. The existential threats facing free societies in Hong Kong and Taiwan have galvanized support throughout the West. The ponderous deliberations in Europe about its political future now cannot be made without an eye to the Far East.

Chinese officials insist that such rivalry is unnecessary. “The world should not be viewed in binary thinking, and differences in systems should not lead to a zero-sum game,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a speech Thursday, seeking to tamp down tensions with Washington. “China will not, and cannot, be another U.S.”

In an unfortunate paradox, the phenomenal rise of China may have created the very conditions for the demise of the Asian century,” wrote the Indian commentator C. Raja Mohan. “That China has become far more powerful than all of its Asian neighbors has meant Beijing no longer sees the need to evoke Asian unity. As it seeks to surpass the United States and emerge as the top dog in the world, it is no surprise that Beijing’s imagination has turned to the construction of a Chinese century.”

Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes

Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.

Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children

We may mention “race,” referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live

in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.

Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley Montagu called “an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits,” derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up a human being

“The idea of race,” Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste.”

Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States

While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste.

Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential.

he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life.

One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”

Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power

over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to

Who is racist in a society where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be “certified” as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs?

With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.

Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism

Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two

Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you

What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.

For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense

Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.

Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.

Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or religion that have consequences in our everyday lives

The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest.

as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols.

The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as Black, with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure, and Native Americans largely exiled outside it.

The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas — the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, the Shudra and the excluded fifth, the Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus — including Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians — who are outside the original caste system but have incorporated themselves into the workings of the country, at times in the face of resistance and attack, and may or may not have informal rankings among themselves and in relation to the varnas.

African-Americans, throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition. After enslavement and well into the 20th century, they were primarily restricted to the role of sharecroppers and servants — domestics, lawn boys, chauffeurs and janitors. The most that those who managed to get an education could hope for was to teach, minister to, attend to the health needs of or bury other subordinate-caste people.

the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.”

So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. “The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”

“Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection,” wrote the Harvard clinical psychologist Elsa Ronningstam in her 2005 book, “Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality.” “He was caught in an illusion.”

The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.”

“The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.”Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem.

They were actually thought to encourage good, healthful posture and to keep the internal organs in proper alignment. And the extreme practice of removing ribs to slim the waist, rumored to have flourished in the Victorian era, simply didn’t exist

Today’s approach to gender-specific colors would confuse—and likely amuse—our 19th-century counterparts. White was the preferred color for babies and children of any sex until they reached the age of about 6 or 7, mainly because white clothes and diapers could be bleached. As they grew older, children were dressed in paler versions of the colors adults wore. Red was considered a strong, virile, masculine shade, while blue was dainty, delicate, feminine. So young boys were more frequently seen in pink, while young girls favored pale blue. It wasn’t until the early 20th century—quite possibly as late as the 1940s—that pink began to be universally assigned to girls and blue to boys.

And that was just the beginning. Here are five significant ways that America was changed by 9/11.

When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.

When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. The fight in Afghanistan had support from the American people and the backing of NATO allies to dismantle al Qaeda, crush the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, the murderous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

in 2015 and in 2016, that figure surpassed 2001 numbers, reaching 127.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks was that 19 al Qaeda hijackers were not only able to board commercial aircraft with crude weapons but also force their way into the cockpit. It was clear that 9/11 was both a failure of America’s intelligence apparatus to identify the attackers and a failure of airport security systems to stop them. Even though there had already been a handful of high-profile hijackings and bombings of commercial planes, including the tragic 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, security was not a high priority for airlines before 9/11, says Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University and a noted aviation security expert.

 Yet the ever-present shadow of 9/11, Jenkins says, kept U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere for nearly 20 years.

In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U.S. travelers to extensive new security protocols. Tickets and photo IDs became required to get through the screening area. Laptop computers and electronics had to be removed from carry-on bags. Shoes were taken off. Liquids were restricted to three-ounce containers. And conventional X-ray machines, which only detected metal objects, were eventually replaced with full-body scanners.

Just four days after the 9/11 attacks, a gunman in Mesa, Arizona went on a shooting rampage. First, he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner of Indian descent. Sodhi was Sikh, so he wore a turban. The gunman assumed he was Muslim. Minutes later, the gunman shot at another gas station clerk of Lebanese descent, but missed, and then shot through the windows of an Afghan-American family.

Before 9/11, people didn’t have to have a ticket to wander around the airport or wait at the gate. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane. And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. Price says that most airports didn’t bother running background checks on their employees, and checked baggage was never scanned.

FBI conducted surveillance. Long-standing rules meant to protect Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” were loosened or thrown out in the name of national security.

Congress gave the FBI and NSA new abilities to collect and share data. For example, the Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies the power to search an individual’s library records and internet search history with little judicial oversight. Agents could search a home without notifying the owner, and wiretap a phone line without establishing probable cause.

This law gave the NSA nearly unchecked authorities to eavesdrop on American phone calls, text messages and emails under the premise of targeting foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. 

“If anyone had said this is what they expected the threat to be the day after 9/11, they probably would have been laughed at,” says Sterman. “That would have seemed hopelessly naive.”

this idea and its implications stir more controversy among criminologists than any other. Would you state your position as precisely as possible in this brief space?

Latzer: First of all, culture and race, in the biological or genetic sense, are very different. Were it not for the racism of the 18th and 19th centuries, we might not have had a marked cultural difference between blacks and whites in the U.S. But history cannot be altered, only studied and sometimes deplored. 28 28

Different groups of people, insofar as they consider themselves separate from others, share various cultural characteristics: dietary, religious, linguistic, artistic, etc. They also share common beliefs and values. There is nothing terribly controversial about this. If it is mistaken then the entire fields of sociology and anthropology are built on mistaken premises.

With respect to violent crime, scholars are most interested in a group's preference for violence as a way of resolving interpersonal conflict. Some groups, traditionally rural, developed cultures of “honor”—strong sensitivities to personal insult. We see this among white and black southerners in the 19th century, and among southern Italian and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. in the early 20th century. These groups engaged in high levels of assaultive crimes in response to perceived slights, mainly victimizing their own kind.

This honor culture explains the high rates of violent crime among African Americans who, living amidst southern whites for over a century, incorporated those values. When blacks migrated north in the 20th century, they transported these rates of violence. Elijah Anderson's book, The Code of the Streets, describes the phenomenon, and Thomas Sowell, in Black Liberals and White Rednecks, helps explain it. 28 28

Theories of crime that point to poverty and racism have the advantage of explaining why low-income groups predominate when it comes to violent crime. What they really explain, though, is why more affluent groups refrain from such crime. And the answer is that middle-class people (regardless of race) stand to lose a great deal from such behavior.

The cultural explanation for violence is superior to explanations that rest of poverty or racism, however, because it can account for the differentials in the violent-crime rates of groups with comparable adversities

Frum: Let’s flash forward to the present day. You make short work of most of the theories explaining the crime drop-off since the mid-1990s: the Freakonomics theory that attributes the crime decline to easier access to abortion after 1970; the theory that credits reductions in lead poisoning; and the theory that credits the mid-1990s economic spurt. Why are these ideas wrong? And what would you put in their place? 28 28

both the abortion and leaded-gasoline theories are mistaken because of a failure to explain the crime spike that immediately preceded the great downturn. Abortions became freely available starting in the 1970s, which is also when lead was removed from gasoline. Fast-forward 15 to 20 years to the period in which unwanted babies had been removed from the population and were not part of the late adolescent, early adult, cohort. This cohort was responsible for the huge spike in crime in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the crack cocaine crime rise. Why didn't the winnowing through abortion of this population reduce crime?

Likewise, the lead removal theory. The same "lead-free" generation that engaged in less crime from 1993 on committed high rates of violent crime between 1987 and 1992.

As for economic booms, it is tempting to argue that they reduce crime on the theory that people who have jobs and higher incomes have less incentive to rob and steal. This is true. But violent crimes, such as murder and manslaughter, assault, and rape, are not motivated by pecuniary interests. They are motivated by arguments, often of a seemingly petty nature, desires for sexual conquest by violence in the case of rape, or domestic conflicts, none of which are related to general economic conditions

Rises in violent crime have much more to do with migrations of high-crime cultures, especially to locations in which governments, particularly crime-control agents, are weak.

Declines are more likely when crime controls are strong, and there are no migrations or demographic changes associated with crime rises

In short, the aging of the violent boomer generation followed by the sudden rise and demise of the crack epidemic best explains the crime trough that began in the mid-1990s and seems to be continuing even today.

Contrary to leftist claims, strengthened law enforcement played a major role in the crime decline. The strengthening was the result of criminal-justice policy changes demanded by the public, black and white, and was necessitated by the weakness of the criminal justice system in the late ‘60s

On the other hand, conservatives tend to rely too much on the strength of the criminal-justice system in explaining crime oscillations, which, as I said, have a great to do with migrations and demographics

The contemporary challenge is to keep law enforcement strong without alienating African Americans, an especially difficult proposition given the outsized violent-crime rates in low-income black communities.

Frum: The sad exception to the downward trend in crime since 1990 is the apparent increase in mass shootings

Should such attacks be included in our thinking about crime? If so, how should we think about them? 28 28

If we separate out the ideologically motivated mass killings, such as Orlando (apparently) and San Bernardino, then we have a different problem. Surveilling potential killers who share a violent ideology will be extremely difficult but worthwhile. Limiting the availability of rapid-fire weapons with high-capacity ammunition clips is also worth doing, but politically divisive.

of course, developments abroad will affect the number of incidents, as will the copycat effect in the immediate aftermath of an incident. This is a complex problem, different from ordinary killings, which, by the way, take many more lives.

the Mamluks eventually forced Shaggar ad Durr to marry their commander Aybeg. Louis’ crusade therefore proved the catalyst for the Mamluks to finally dispense with their Ayyubid overlords. The Bahri Mamluk dynasty was set up in 1250, with Aybeg as its first, though not uncontested, sultan

The Mamluk dynasty was now secure, and it lasted until the 16th century. Power struggles prevented continuity at the centre, and even after the Circassian Burji Mamluks seized power from the Bahri Mamluks in the mid-14th century, factionalism and insecurity continued unabated. The Mamluks managed successfully to re-establish their Syrian powerbases following Timur’s brief but hugely destructive invasion in the early 1400s; but the dynasty had been left weakened by the Black Death which had made repeated onslaughts through the Middle East from the mid-14th century and it soon lost the valuable trade revenues of Syria after the Portuguese had opened up Europe’s Ocean trade and the route to India in the later 15th century. In the end it took two only two brief battles for the Ottoman Sultan Selim I to decimate the last Mamluk army to take the field just outside Cairo near the Pyramids in 1517.

Selim I continued to employ a Mamluk as viceroy, however, and recruitment of Circassians as ‘tax farmers’ continued until the new age arrived in Egypt with Napoleon’s army in 1798. Indeed faction building and Mamluk infighting were still characteristic of Egyptian politics in the early 19th century. 

But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.

A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain

The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.

These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s

In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era

It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.

The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.

The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.

Sugar was a luxury in Europe prior to the 18th century. It became widely popular in the 18th century, then graduated to becoming a necessity in the 19th century.

Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not.

A risk associated with Thucydides’s Trap is that business as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.

The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”

More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides offered a powerful insight: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.

Note that Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic: the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other.

However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be—none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.

Four of the 16 cases in our review did not end in bloodshed. Those successes, as well as the failures, offer pertinent lessons for today’s world leaders. Escaping the Trap requires tremendous effort

Lee Kuan Yew, the world’s premier China watcher and a mentor to Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in March, the founder of Singapore put the odds of China continuing to grow at several times U.S. rates for the next decade and beyond as “four chances in five.

Could China become #1? In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?

Could China Become #1? Manufacturer: Exporter: Trading nation: Saver: Holder of U.S. debt: Foreign-direct-investment destination: Energy consumer: Oil importer: Carbon emitter: Steel producer: Auto market: Smartphone market: E-commerce market: Luxury-goods market:   Internet user: Fastest supercomputer: Holder of foreign reserves: Source of initial public offerings: Primary engine of global growth: Economy: Most are stunned to learn that on each of these 20 indicators, China has already surpassed the U.S.

In 1980, China had 10 percent of America’s GDP as measured by purchasing power parity; 7 percent of its GDP at current U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 6 percent of its exports. The foreign currency held by China, meanwhile, was just one-sixth the size of America’s reserves. The answers for the second column: By 2014, those figures were 101 percent of GDP; 60 percent at U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 106 percent of exports. China’s reserves today are 28 times larger than America’s.

On whether China’s leaders are serious about displacing the United States as the top power in Asia in the foreseeable future, Lee answered directly: “Of course. Why not … how could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?” And about accepting its place in an international order designed and led by America, he said absolutely not: “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.”

As the United States emerged as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere in the 1890s, how did it behave? Future President Theodore Roosevelt personified a nation supremely confident that the 100 years ahead would be an American century. Over a decade that began in 1895 with the U.S. secretary of state declaring the United States “sovereign on this continent,” America liberated Cuba; threatened Britain and Germany with war to force them to accept American positions on disputes in Venezuela and Canada; backed an insurrection that split Colombia to create a new state of Panama (which immediately gave the U.S. concessions to build the Panama Canal); and attempted to overthrow the government of Mexico, which was supported by the United Kingdom and financed by London bankers. In the half century that followed, U.S. military forces intervened in “our hemisphere” on more than 30 separate occasions to settle economic or territorial disputes in terms favorable to Americans, or oust leaders they judged unacceptable

When Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s fast march to the market in 1978, he announced a policy known as “hide and bide.” What China needed most abroad was stability and access to markets. The Chinese would thus “bide our time and hide our capabilities,” which Chinese military officers sometimes paraphrased as getting strong before getting even.

With the arrival of China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, the era of “hide and bide” is over

Many observers outside China have missed the great divergence between China’s economic performance and that of its competitors over the seven years since the financial crisis of 2008 and Great Recession. That shock caused virtually all other major economies to falter and decline. China never missed a year of growth, sustaining an average growth rate exceeding 8 percent. Indeed, since the financial crisis, nearly 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in just one country: China

What Xi Jinping calls the “China Dream” expresses the deepest aspirations of hundreds of millions of Chinese, who wish to be not only rich but also powerful. At the core of China’s civilizational creed is the belief—or conceit—that China is the center of the universe. In the oft-repeated narrative, a century of Chinese weakness led to exploitation and national humiliation by Western colonialists and Japan. In Beijing’s view, China is now being restored to its rightful place, where its power commands recognition of and respect for China’s core interests.

Last November, in a seminal meeting of the entire Chinese political and foreign-policy establishment, including the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi provided a comprehensive overview of his vision of China’s role in the world. The display of self-confidence bordered on hubris. Xi began by offering an essentially Hegelian conception of the major historical trends toward multipolarity (i.e. not U.S. unipolarity) and the transformation of the international system (i.e. not the current U.S.-led system). In his words, a rejuvenated Chinese nation will build a “new type of international relations” through a “protracted” struggle over the nature of the international order. In the end, he assured his audience that “the growing trend toward a multipolar world will not change.”

Given objective trends, realists see an irresistible force approaching an immovable object. They ask which is less likely: China demanding a lesser role in the East and South China Seas than the United States did in the Caribbean or Atlantic in the early 20th century, or the U.S. sharing with China the predominance in the Western Pacific that America has enjoyed since World War II?

At this point, the established script for discussion of policy challenges calls for a pivot to a new strategy (or at least slogan), with a short to-do list that promises peaceful and prosperous relations with China. Shoehorning this challenge into that template would demonstrate only one thing: a failure to understand the central point I’m trying to make

What strategists need most at the moment is not a new strategy, but a long pause for reflection. If the tectonic shift caused by China’s rise poses a challenge of genuinely Thucydidean proportions, declarations about “rebalancing,” or revitalizing “engage and hedge,” or presidential hopefuls’ calls for more “muscular” or “robust” variants of the same, amount to little more than aspirin treating cancer. Future historians will compare such assertions to the reveries of British, German, and Russian leaders as they sleepwalked into 1914

The rise of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.3 billion people is not a problem to be fixed. It is a condition—a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation

Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent summits of presidents, and additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.

most economists see global trade as a win-win proposition, but resource limitation turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest. “The faster China grows, the higher grain prices go, the more people in China or India who upgrade to meat, the higher the tendency for Africa to starve,” he said.

Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution, which “partially removed the barriers to rapid population growth, wealth and scientific progress.” That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries, but now, ready or not, the age of cheap hydrocarbons is ending. Grantham’s July letter concludes: “We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability. The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable.”

“E.D.F. is educating people that dealing with climate change will be good for the economy and job creation. One of Jeremy’s insights is that we can make headway on the market side because higher commodity prices will enforce greater efficiency.”

When he reminds us that modern capitalism isn’t equipped to handle long-range problems or tragedies of the commons (situations like overfishing or global warming, in which acting rationally in your own self-interest only deepens the harm to all), when he urges us to outgrow our touching faith in the efficiency of markets and boundless human ingenuity, and especially when he says that a wise investor can prosper in the coming hard times, his bad news and its silver lining come with a built-in answer to the skeptical question that Americans traditionally pose to egghead Cassandras: If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?

Grantham believes that the best approach may be to recast global warming, which depresses crop yields and worsens soil erosion, as a factor contributing to resource depletion. “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change,” he said. “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.”

“Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan,” he said, “but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”

Grantham, the public face of a company that manages more than $100 billion in assets, the very embodiment of a high-finance insider in blue blazer and yellow tie, has serious doubts about capitalism’s ability to address the biggest problems facing humanity.

Grantham says that corporations respond well to this message because they are “persuaded by data,” but American public opinion is harder to move, and contemporary American political culture is practically dataproof. “The politicians are the worst,” he said. “An Indian economist once said to me, ‘We have 28 political parties, and they all think climate change is important.’ ” Whatever the precise number of parties in India, and it depends on how you count, his point was that the U.S. has just two that matter, one that dismisses global warming as a hoax and one that now avoids the subject.

Grantham, who says that “this time it’s different are the four most dangerous words in the English language,” has become a connoisseur of bubbles. His historical study of more than 300 of them shows the same pattern occurring again and again. A bump in sales or some other impressive development causes people to get excited. When they do, the price of that asset class — South Sea company shares, dot-coms — goes up, and human nature and the financial industry conspire to push it higher. People want to hear good news; they tend to be bad with numbers and uncertainty, and to assume that present conditions will persist. In the financial industry, the imperative to minimize career risk produces herd behavior.

So it’s news when Grantham, who has built his career on the conviction that peaks and troughs will even out as prices inevitably revert to their historical mean, says that this time it really is different, and not in a good way. In his April letter, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” he argued that “we are in the midst of one of the giant inflection points in economic history.” The market is “sending us the Mother of all price signals,” warning us that “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”

here’s the short version: “The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”

When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”

Grantham is taking the Malthusian side in an ongoing debate about growth and commodity prices­. The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities.

He’s an impassioned environmentalist not only for the usual reasons but also because he believes humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. “This commodities thing may turn out to be the most interesting call of my career,” he told me. “I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.”

“Whether the stable population will be 1.5 billion or 5 billion,” he said to me, “the question is: How do we get there?”

Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton.

In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf.

the slave plantations that spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says, there would have been no Industrial Revolution.

Beckert’s most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence.

Then planters discovered that climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the process.

As soon as the profit potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late 1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased. Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European traders used to buy slaves in Africa.

The search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex.”

by 1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land that had been taken over by the United States since the beginning of the century.

it was not only white Southerners who were responsible for the harsh regime of slave-grown cotton: merchants and bankers in the North and in Britain lent them money and were investors as well.

another major theme of “Empire of Cotton” is that, contrary to the myth of untrammeled free enterprise, this expanding industry was fueled at every stage by government intervention.

it was not just in the United States that planters’ thirst to sow large tracts with cotton pushed indigenous peoples and self-sufficient farmers off their land; colonial armies did the same thing in India, West Africa and elsewhere

Beckert practices what is known as global or world history: the study of events not limited to one country or continent.

From Denmark to Mexico to Russia, states lent large sums to early clothing manufacturers. Whether it was canals and railways in Europe or levees on the Mississippi, governments jumped in to build or finance the infrastructure that big cotton growers and mills demanded

Britain forced Egypt and other territories to lower or eliminate their import duties on British cotton.

he wants to use that commodity as a lens on the development of the modern world itself. This he divides into two overlapping phases: “war capitalism” for the stage when slavery and colonial conquest prepared the ground for the cotton industry, and “industrial capitalism” for the period when states intervened to protect and help the business in other ways

Today, a “giant race to the bottom” by an industry always looking for cheaper labor has shifted most cotton growing and the work of turning it into clothing back to Asia

violence in different forms is still all too present. In Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to work harvesting cotton each year

In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.

in Bangladesh, the more than 1,100 people killed in the notorious collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 were mostly female clothing workers, whose employers were as careless about their safety as those who enforced 14- or 16-hour workdays in German and Spanish weaving mills a century before

In the centuries that followed, Buddhism in Japan developed robustly. During the 7th through 9th centuries, Buddhism in China enjoyed a "golden age" and Chinese monks brought the newest developments in practice and scholarship to Japan.

Six schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan in the 7th and 8th centuries and all but two of which have disappeared. These schools flourished mostly during the Nara Period of Japanese history (709 to 795 CE). Today, they are sometimes lumped together into one category known as Nara Buddhism.

After the Nara period, five other schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan that remain prominent today. These are Tendai, Shingon, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.

Tendai is best known for two distinctive features. One, it considers the Lotus Sutra to be the supreme sutra and the perfect expression of the Buddha's teachings. Second, it synthesizes the teachings of other schools, resolving contradictions and finding a middle way between extremes.

Shingon is the only non-Tibetan school of Vajrayana. Many of the teachings and rituals of Shingon are esoteric, passed orally from teacher to student, and not made public. Shingon remains one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan.

Very simply, Pure Land emphasizes faith the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Butsu in Japanese) through which one may be reborn in the Pure Land and be nearer to Nirvana. Pure Land is sometimes called Amidism.

After some years of study at Mount Hiei and other monasteries, Nichiren believed that the Lotus Sutra contained the complete teachings of the Buddha.

Nichiren also believed fervently that all of Japan must be guided by the Lotus Sutra or lose the protection and favor of the Buddha. He condemned other schools of Buddhism, particularly Pure Land.

The Buddhist establishment became annoyed with Nichiren and sent him into a series of exiles that lasted most of the rest of his life. Even so, he gained followers, and by the time of his death, Nichiren Buddhism was firmly established in Japan.

In time, this favoritism led to a partisan rivalry, which sometimes became violent.

 Japanese Buddhist culture flourished in the 14th century and Buddhist influence was reflected in art, poetry, architecture, gardening, and the tea ceremony.

After Nichiren, no new major schools of Buddhism developed in Japan. However, the existing schools grew, evolved, split, fused, and otherwise developed in many ways.

The influence of Buddhism declined, however. Buddhism faced competition from Shinto -- the Japanese indigenous religion -- as well as Confucianism. To keep the three rivals separated, the government decreed that Buddhism would have first place in matters of religion, Confucianism would have first place in matters of morality, and Shinto would have first place in matters of state.

The Meiji Restoration in 1868 restored the power of the Emperor. In the state religion, Shinto, the emperor was worshiped as a living god.

The Emperor was not a god in Buddhism, however. This may be why the Meiji government ordered Buddhism banished

Temples were burned or destroyed, and priests and monks were forced to return to lay life.

Buddhism was too deeply ingrained in Japan's culture and history to disappear, however. Eventually, the banishment was lifted. But the Meiji government was not done with Buddhism yet.

In 1872, the Meiji government decreed that Buddhist monks and priests (but not nuns) should be free to marry if they chose to do so. Soon "temple families" became commonplace and the administration of temples and monasteries became family businesses, handed down from fathers to sons.

Today, the government of Japan recognizes more than 150 schools of Buddhism, but the major schools are still Nara (mostly Kegon), Shingon, Tendai, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.

In more recent years, several news stories have reported that Buddhism is dying in Japan, especially in rural areas.

For generations, the many small "family owned" temples had a monopoly on the funeral business and funerals became their chief source of income. Sons took over temples from their fathers out of duty more than vocation. When combined, these two factors made much of Japanese Buddhism into "funeral Buddhism." Many temples offer little else but funeral and memorial services.

Japanese living in urban centers are losing interest in Buddhism.

Republican Senator Inhofe, who in 2011 “co- sponsored legislation that would prevent the federal government from ‘promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas to address climate change.’”

Based on his research, the historian believes that “in the twenty- first century, as in the seventeenth, coping with [large] catastrophes . . . requires resources that only central governments command.”

he faults the “deep-seated fear of ‘Big Government,’” manifested by Inhofe and others, “that any attempt by a Federal agency to mitigate or avert damaging climate change represents a ‘power grab’ by Washington that must at all costs be resisted.”

Although White believes that historians’ scholarship and public outreach concerning climate change will continue to improve, he is still “concerned that few historians—even environmental historians—are actively working to address what is likely to become the single most urgent public issue of the 21st century.

Few examine the historical factors and decisions that led us to fossil-fuel dependence, climate change denial, and political and diplomatic gridlock on climate policy, with an eye to identifying changes that might bring us out of our current impasse. Moreover, public discussions about climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation rarely discuss insights from historical research.”

They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.

“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”

But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.

closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed.

“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”

“Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.

“You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”

Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.

One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold

we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity

Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past.

we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.

“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.

Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.

We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands.

The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today.

Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.

what happens when an extraordinarily rich society can’t find enough new ideas that justify investing all its stockpiled wealth. We inflate bubbles and then pop them, invest in Theranos and then repent, and the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.

what this tells us, unfortunately, is that 21st-century growth and innovation are not at all that we were promised they would be.

slowly compounding growth is not the same as dynamism. American entrepreneurship has been declining since the 1970s: Early in the Jimmy Carter presidency, 17 percent of all United States businesses had been founded in the previous year; by the start of Barack Obama’s second term, that rate was about 10 percent. In the late 1980s, almost half of United States companies were “young,” meaning less than five years old; by the Great Recession, that share was down to only 39 percent, and the share of “old” firms (founded more than 15 years ago) rose from 22 percent to 34 percent over a similar period

From World War II through the 1980s, according to a recent report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office, private domestic investment often approached 10 percent of G.D.P.; in 2019, despite a corporate tax cut intended to get money off the sidelines, the investment-to-G.D.P. ratio was less than half of that.

This suggests that the people with the most experience starting businesses look around at their investment opportunities and see many more start-ups that resemble Theranos than resemble Amazon, let alone the behemoths of the old economy.

the dearth of corporate investment also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class — basically, already-rich investors getting richer off dividends — rather than reflecting surging prosperity in general.

In 2017 a group of economists published a paper asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” The answer was a clear yes: “We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”

In his 2011 book “The Great Stagnation,” Tyler Cowen cited an analysis from the Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner, who modeled an innovations-to-population ratio for the last 600 years: It shows a slowly ascending arc through the late 19th century, when major inventions were rather easy to conceive and adopt, and a steepening decline ever since, as rich countries spend more and more on research to diminishing returns.

the trends reveal a slowdown, a mounting difficulty in achieving breakthroughs — a bottleneck if you’re optimistic, a ceiling if you aren’t

the relative exception, the internet and all its wonders, highlights the general pattern.

The Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, one of the most persuasive theorists of stagnation, points out that the period from 1840 to 1970 featured dramatic growth and innovation across multiple arenas — energy and transportation and medicine and agriculture and communication and the built environment.

in the last two generations, progress has become increasingly monodimensional — all tech and nothing else.

Take a single one of the great breakthroughs of the industrial age — planes and trains and automobiles, antibiotics and indoor plumbing — and it still looms larger in our everyday existence than all of the contributions of the tech revolution combined.

We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies.

With this stagnation comes social torpor. America is a more peaceable country than it was in 1970 or 1990, with lower crime rates and safer streets and better-behaved kids

it’s also a country where that supposedly most American of qualities, wanderlust, has markedly declined: Americans no longer “go west” (or east or north or south) in search of opportunity the way they did 50 years ago; the rate at which people move between states has fallen from 3.5 percent in the early 1970s to 1.4 percent in 2010. Nor do Americans change jobs as often as they once did.

Meanwhile, those well-behaved young people are more depressed than prior cohorts, less likely to drive drunk or get pregnant but more tempted toward self-harm

For adults, the increasingly legal drug of choice is marijuana, whose prototypical user is a relaxed and harmless figure — comfortably numb, experiencing stagnation as a chill good time.

then there is the opioid epidemic, whose spread across the unhappiest parts of white America passed almost unnoticed in elite circles for a while because the drug itself quiets rather than inflames, supplying a gentle euphoria that lets its users simply slip away, day by day and bit by bit, without causing anyone any trouble

In the land of the lotus eaters, people are also less likely to invest in the future in the most literal of ways. The United States birthrate was once an outlier among developed countries, but since the Great Recession, it has descended rapidly, converging with the wealthy world’s general below-replacement norm.

This demographic decline worsens economic stagnation; economists reckoning with its impact keep finding stark effects. A 2016 analysis found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the population over 60 decreased the growth rate of states’ per capita G.D.P. by 5.5 percent.

This doesn’t excuse the grifting or the rage stoking, especially presidential grifting and rage stoking, and it doesn’t make the mass shootings, when they come, any less horrific. But it’s important context for thinking about whether online politics is really carrying our society downward into civil strife

This feedback loop — in which sterility feeds stagnation, which further discourages childbearing, which sinks society ever-deeper into old age — makes demographic decline a clear example of how decadence overtakes a civilization

Both populism and socialism, Trump and Bernie Sanders, represent expressions of discontent with decadence, rebellions against the technocratic management of stagnation that defined the Obama era.

in practical terms the populist era has mostly delivered a new and deeper stalemate. From Trump’s Washington to the capitals of Europe, Western politics is now polarized between anti-establishment forces that are unprepared to competently govern and an establishment that’s too disliked to effectively rule.

The hysteria with which we’re experiencing them may represent nothing more than the way that a decadent society manages its political passions, by encouraging people to playact extremism, to re-enact the 1930s or 1968 on social media, to approach radical politics as a sport, a hobby, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.

The terrorist in 21st-century America isn’t the guy who sees more deeply than the rest; he’s the guy who doesn’t get it, who takes the stuff he reads on the internet literally in a way that most of the people posting don’t

once we crossed over into permanent below-replacement territory, the birth dearth began undercutting the very forces (youth, risk -taking, dynamism) necessary for continued growth, meaning that any further gains to individual welfare are coming at the future’s expense.

It suggests that the virtual realm might make our battles more ferocious but also more performative and empty; and that online rage is a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant and yet, ultimately, far more stable than it looks on Twitter

in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth.

Human beings can still live vigorously amid a general stagnation, be fruitful amid sterility, be creative amid repetition. And the decadent society, unlike the full dystopia, allows those signs of contradictions to exist

The last hundred-odd years of Western history offer plenty of examples of how the attempt to throw off decadence can bring in far worse evils, from the craving for Meaning and Action that piled corpses at Verdun and Passchendaele, to the nostalgic yearning for the Cold War that inspired post-9/11 crusading and led to a military quagmire in the Middle East.

So you can even build a case for decadence, not as a falling-off or disappointing end, but as a healthy balance between the misery of poverty and the dangers of growth for growth’s sake

A sustainable decadence, if you will, in which the crucial task for 21st-century humanity would be making the most of a prosperous stagnation: learning to temper our expectations and live within limits; making sure existing resources are distributed more justly; using education to lift people into the sunlit uplands of the creative class; and doing everything we can to help poorer countries transition successfully into our current position

this argument carries you only so far. Even if the dystopia never quite arrives, the longer a period of stagnation continues, the narrower the space for fecundity and piety, memory and invention, creativity and daring.

So decadence must be critiqued and resisted

by the hope that where there’s stability, there also might eventually be renewal,

The next renaissance will be necessarily different, but realism about our own situation should make us more inclined, not less, to look and hope for one — for the day when our culture feels more fruitful, our politics less futile and the frontiers that seem closed today are opened once again.

The Crusades played a role in ushering in the Renaissance

that there were three main periods that saw resurgences in the art and philosophy of antiquity: the Carolingian Renaissance, which occurred during the reign of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (eighth and ninth centuries), the Ottonian Renaissance, which developed during the reigns of emperors Otto I, Otto II and Otto III (10thcentury) and the 12thCentury Renaissance. 

classical texts and knowledge never completely vanished from Europe during the Middle Ages

The fall of the Byzantine and Roman Empires at the hands of the Ottomans also played a role

The Black Death helped set the stage for the Renaissance,

The Medici family moved to Florence in the wake of the plague. They, and many others, took advantage of opportunities for greater social mobility. Becoming patrons of artists was a popular way for such newly powerful families to demonstrate their wealth.

The printing press was developed in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. It allowed Bibles, secular books, printed music and more to be made in larger amounts and reach more people.

Patrons made it possible for successful Renaissance artists to work and develop new techniques. The Catholic Church commissioned most artwork during the Middle Ages, and while it continued to do so during the Renaissance, wealthy individuals also became important patrons

Florence was the initial epicenter of Renaissance art but by the end of the 15thcentury, Rome had overtaken it.

the Catholic Church's influence was waning as the 15thcentury began. The re-emergence of classical texts and the rise in Renaissance humanism changed society's approach to religion and the authority of the papacy

"The Renaissance was a time of transition from the ancient world to the modern and provided the foundation for the birth of the Age of Enlightenment," said Abernethy. The developments in science, art, philosophy and trade, as well as technological advancements like the printing press, left lasting impressions on society and set the stage for many elements of our modern culture. 

Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.

The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?

“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects

But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.

The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”

it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.

“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”

Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.

“It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life

how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.

It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change

The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.

Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.

For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”

“There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”

“we’re all in this together.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.

every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.

It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels

Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.

“Seriously, it is not reversible.”

First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”

Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.

If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.

If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.

The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.

“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt

“But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.

“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”

“I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”

adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one

Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.

“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”

It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”

And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.

Cascading Disasters

Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.

Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.

If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.

as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.

Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.

One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves

A Lifetime of Clues

For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.

As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,

“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”

ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.

“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”

“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”

At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”

As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families

The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.

That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease

s a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.