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President Obama won re-election thanks in part to a 52-percentage-point spread among Latino voters, the nation's fastest-growing electorate, according to election eve polling. In the America coming over the horizon, it is practically impossible to overcome such a number and win the race for president.According to the polling by Latino Decisions, Hispanic voters nationally and across every battleground state swung heavily to Democrats.

Nationwide, the margin was 75% to 23%. And there were remarkable spreads in the tightest of swing states: 87% to 10% in Colorado, 82% to 17% in Ohio, 66% to 31% in Virginia. (CNN's own poll showed a smaller but still significant spread nationwide -- 71% to 21% -- and in the swing states).

law enforcement and business leaders have worked with immigrant leaders across the political spectrum to forge a new consensus on immigrants and America.

None of this is to say that the world should give up. Beyond nuclear power, we need to be placing medium-sized bets on potentially transformative technologies not funded by regressive taxes or industrial subsidies, and not dependent on future breakthroughs that might still be decades off, if they happen at all. Let thousands of climate-startups bloom — and let markets, not governments, figure out which ones work.

Bret There are many practical solutions to this most difficult problem and heaping facile criticism on a selected set to disparage the lot is not helping Paul Hawkin's Project Drawdown ranks 100 solutions in order of impact on reducing CO2 based on the input of scientists https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank Why don't you use your political acumen and prominent voice to contribute positively by ranking them by political sale-ability to the the persuadable right wing and other opponents so something can get done? For your kids...

To have a diagnosis is not to have a cure, and bad cures can be worse than the disease. Those who think otherwise are also living in denial

There is no shortage of hype about artificial intelligence and big data, but models are the source of the real power behind these tools. A model is a decision framework in which the logic is derived by algorithm from data, rather than explicitly programmed by a developer or implicitly conveyed via a person’s intuition. The output is a prediction on which a decision can be mad

Once created, a model can learn from its successes and failures with speed and sophistication that humans usually cannot match

Building this system requires a mechanism (often software-based) to collect data, processes to create models from the data, the models themselves, and a mechanism (also often software based) to deliver or act on the suggestions from those models.

farmers, agricultural scientists and industry officials say a new threat has been ruining harvests, upending lives and adding to the surge of families migrating to the United States: climate change.

Gradually rising temperatures, more extreme weather events and increasingly unpredictable patterns — like rain not falling when it should, or pouring when it shouldn’t — have disrupted growing cycles and promoted the relentless spread of pests.

Central America is among the regions most vulnerable to climate change, scientists say. And because agriculture employs much of the labor force — about 28 percent in Honduras alone, according to the World Bank — the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake.

With a total of 419 ancient human genomes obtained by various laboratories, Iberia offers a rich trove. Scientists have recovered only 174 ancient genomes in Britain, and just eight in Japan.

researchers have also uncovered evidence of migrations that were previously unknown. Iberia, it now seems, was a crossroads long before recorded history, as far back as the last ice age.

Iberian hunter-gatherers had a remarkable mix of genes, showing that they descended from two profoundly distinct groups of early European hunter-gatherers.

If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the Civil War. The slave economy had been very good to American prosperity. By the start of the war, the South was producing 75 percent of the world’s cotton and creating more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. Slaves represented Southern planters’ most significant investment—and the bulk of their wealth.

Building a commercial enterprise out of the wilderness required labor and lots of it. For much of the 1600s, the American colonies operated as agricultural economies, driven largely by indentured servitude. Most workers were poor, unemployed laborers from Europe who, like others, had traveled to North America for a new life. In exchange for their work, they received food and shelter, a rudimentary education and sometimes a trade.

With ideal climate and available land, property owners in the southern colonies began establishing plantation farms for cash crops like rice, tobacco and sugar cane—enterprises that required increasing amounts of labor. To meet the need, wealthy planters turned to slave traders, who imported ever more human chattel to the colonies, the vast majority from West Africa. As more slaves were imported and an upsurge in slave fertility rates expanded the “inventory,” a new industry was born: the slave auction. These open markets where humans were inspected like animals and bought and sold to the highest bidder proved an increasingly lucrative enterprise. In the 17th century, slaves would fetch between five and ten dollars. But by the mid-19th century, an able-bodied slave fetched an average price between $1,200-$1,500.

President Donald Trump's decision to crack down on Chinese trade practices may seem a world away from the rural roads of Martin County, Minnesota, the self-proclaimed "Bacon Capitol of the USA."

"I think the marketplace is speaking for itself. Hog futures are down. Stock market is down," says David Preisler, the CEO for the Minnesota Pork Board said Wednesday. "There are some pieces in the President's trade policy that we really like, but this is a big piece that we don't."

And tariffs on soybeans, a cash crop for much of the Midwest, could impact key Senate races in North Dakota and Ohio, two states in the top 10 of soybean producing states.

As CNN's chief Washington correspondent, Jake Tapper is often focused on breaking news and the latest political stories, but the host of The Lead and State of the Union switched things up a bit for his latest project. Tapper's new novel, The Hellfire Club, takes place in 1954 Washington, D.C., during Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Communist "witch hunt." He says that although 64 years separate his characters from today's political players, many of the themes apply. "I thought it would be fun to try to capture the 'swamp' and some other things about Washington and talk about 2018 in some ways, but ... from the lens of 1954," Tapper says.

He kept talking during the commercial break. ... The same attacks on me and CNN and basically what you heard on camera he was saying off camera. Eventually we were ticking down and I said, "OK, you have to go." And he wouldn't go. And it got heated and eventually, before we came back from commercial break, he had to be escorted out. And then he went on Fox and denied it the next day which is also odd, because one thing we have an abundance [of] at a TV studio is cameras filming things. So it was odd to hear him deny that, but these people lie about everything, so why wouldn't he lie about that? ... He knows the truth. He knows a guard escorted him out of the studio, down the elevator, through the lobby, out the door. He knows that that happened.

So I see the Jar Jar Binks principle everywhere, and I think it's important to keep people around you who will tell you when you're being a jerk. And I have lots of people like that in my life — many, many people. Some of them are even in my house. I think it's very important, and I think that President Trump is a victim of the Jar Jar Binks principle. I think he removes people from his life that tell him negative things and sometimes for survival they stop criticizing the president, sometimes for survival they leave, sometimes they get pushed out the door. But I think that's a problem with him and I think it's one for successful people to keep in mind.

cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.

The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.

Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.

Somewhere ahead is a cliff: a calamitous reversal of humanity’s fortunes. Nobody can see exactly where it is, but everyone knows that at some point the bus will have to turn. Problem is, Wizards and Prophets disagree about which way to yank the wheel. Each is certain that following the other’s ideas will send the bus over the cliff. As they squabble, the number of passengers keeps rising.

Nowadays the Prophets’ fears about industrial agriculture’s exhausting the soil seem prescient: A landmark 2011 study from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that up to a third of the world’s cropland is degraded.

At first, reconciling the two points of view might have been possible. One can imagine Borlaugian Wizards considering manure and other natural soil inputs, and Vogtian Prophets willing to use chemicals as a supplement to good soil practice. But that didn’t happen. Hurling insults, the two sides moved further apart. They set in motion a battle that has continued into the 21st century—and become ever more intense with the ubiquity of genetically modified crops. That battle is not just between two philosophies, two approaches to technology, two ways of thinking how best to increase the food supply for a growing population. It is about whether the tools we choose will ensure the survival of the planet or hasten its destruction.

The overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in February 1848 still seems, in retrospect, a puzzling event. The revolution has been called a result without a cause; more properly, it might be called a result out of proportion to its cause.

Since 1840 the regime had settled into a kind of torpid stability; but it had provided the nation with peace abroad and relative prosperity at home. Louis-Philippe and his ministers had prided themselves on their moderation, their respect for the ideal of cautious balance embodied in the concept of juste-milieu. France seemed to be arriving at last at a working compromise that blended traditional ways with the reforms of the Revolutionary era

There were, nevertheless, persistent signs of discontent. The republicans had never forgiven Louis-Philippe for “confiscating” their revolution in 1830. The urban workers, moved by their misery and by the powerful social myths engendered by the Revolution of 1789,

The Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture is concealing government-funded studies about the harms climate change will wreak on the farming and food production industry,

The studies have been conducted by scientists within the Ag Department and approved by the Agricultural Research Service. They focus specially on the negative impacts of  increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the farming and cattle industry

the studies found that rice does not contain as many vitamins when grown in carbon-heavy environments and carbon dioxide increases can reduce the growth of grasses needed to raise cattle.

A pair of U.S. economists, William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, share the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for integrating climate change, and technological change, into macroeconomics, which deals with the behaviour of an economy as a whole.

Nordhaus, at the University of Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, is the founding father of the study of climate change economics

Economic models he has developed since the 1990s are now widely used to weigh the costs and benefits of curbing greenhouse gas emissions against those of inaction

I used to be a climate-change skeptic. I was one of those conservatives who thought that the science was inconclusive, that fears of global warming were as overblown as fears of a new ice age in the 1970s, that climate change was natural and cyclical, and that there was no need to incur any economic costs to deal with this speculative threat.

I no longer think any of that, because the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing.

“Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced, with widespread and growing impacts.”

To have just a 50% chance of meeting the 1.5C means halving global emissions over the next decade and hitting “net zero” emissions by about 2050

That means every sector of every country in the world needs to be, on average, zero emissions. That’s electricity, transport, industry, farming, the lot.

there are some areas where zero emissions by 2050 is impossible. There will, for example, always be some emissions from the farming needed to feed more than 10 billion people this century

Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty.

“The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change – we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.

“It didn’t rain this year. Last year it didn’t rain,” he said softly. “My maize field didn’t produce a thing. With my expenses, everything we invested, we didn’t have any earnings. There was no harvest.”

Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.

the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.

The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.

e have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial. In the rich nations, we have begun to believe we have transcended the material world.

The wealth we’ve accumulated – often at the expense of others – has shielded us from reality. Living behind screens, passing between capsules – our houses, cars, offices and shopping malls – we persuaded ourselves that contingency had retreated, that we had reached the point all civilisations seek: insulation from natural hazards.

The temptation, when this pandemic has passed, will be to find another bubble. We cannot afford to succumb to it. From now on, we should expose our minds to the painful realities we have denied for too long.

resh farm produce is healthy and delicious. Most of the time, that’s reason enough to sign up for a community-supported agriculture program (CSA), a system in which one pays to regularly receive goodie bags of whatever happens to be flourishing in nearby farmers’ fields, often along with optional local meat and dairy add-ons. Now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, bolstering local food systems is especially urgent – and there’s more at stake than just really good tomatoes.

This financial crunch will only compound the difficulties that led US farm bankruptcies to an eight-year high in 2019, such as low commodity prices and flooding and fires caused by climate change.

The CSA model is designed to benefit small-scale farmers by allowing them to sell “shares” of their crops during seasons when their expenses are high but their income is not – including winter and early spring. Many CSAs also allow you to donate directly to local farmers, or provide the option of working on a farm, co-op style.

The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.

Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed.

A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.