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The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-a-climate-change-skeptic.html global warming climate research results
shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
  • Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
  • The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
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  • our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent.
  • How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.
  • What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.
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The Weekend Interview With Norman Davies: The Emperor of Vanished Kingdoms - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3918304577240984211126416.html governance Europe integration collapse political US historical gradualism crisis
shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe. From where he sits, Europe's problem is one of failed governance. "It all started, I guess, in the 1990s, with the Yugoslav wars and the inability of the Europeans to do anything basic about a war in their backyard."
  • "I now feel that the thing that is being proved wrong is what some people call the 'gradualist fallacy'—that . . . you drive European integration forward by economic means," he says. "And it's just wrong."
  • After World War II, Europeans set about forming a union along three axes: politics, defense and economics. Britain quickly rejected political union, however, and soon enough NATO came along to become the only defense union Western Europe needed. An economic union—the European Economic Community, established in 1957—was the only remaining pillar of integration left to pursue.
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  • Europe has had only four years since the war when it didn't have its hands full—not much time to make a functioning union for 500 million people.
  • Instead, Mr. Davies says, the EU has become a vehicle by which the stronger countries promote their interests—led, for the moment, by the tag team of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "So although all the member states have to be democracies—this is one of the conditions for entry—they're not required to act democratically once they're in."
  • "There are one or two people around," he says, "who might, at the meeting of the Council of Ministers, instead of doing [the] horse-trading which goes on all the time, say, 'Enough of all of this. We are all going to lose the European Union unless we do something today.'"
  • "A lot of this crisis is to do with a period of economic growth, limitless money, people not worrying about getting into debt—mind-sapping comfort." He adds, "Western Europeans to a large extent are still in that comfort zone, whereas East Europeans have lived through much harder times and are much more appreciative of the degree of freedom and prosperity that they have got, that 20 years ago they didn't."
  • "Europe 100 years ago was bullish," he says, and there's something in the American psyche that bears uncanny resemblance to Europeans' optimism, in the years before World War I broke out in 1914, about their peaceful, prosperous future. Does pride come before the fall? "The United States is this late-19th-century, 20th-century power which has a lot of those attitudes," he says.
  • "It's like an avalanche, where you've got a huge frozen snowfield, which on the surface looks absolutely ideal. . . . All the changes in the ice field come from the sun shining on them, and the water melts underneath. But you can't actually see it. And you equally can't see which part of the snowfield is going to move first."
  • "But it happens in a second. Before the avalanche, the sun shines, it looks beautiful, and there's a sound like a gunshot, where the ice cracks. And the whole damn lot falls into the valley."
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A CO2 Warning Etched in Stone and Sediment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-etched-in-stone-and-sedimen global warming carbon environment biological crisis
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 12 - Cached
  • A comprehensive new review of research on episodes of carbon-driven disruption of ocean and climate conditions over the last 300 million years shows the power of a big pulse of carbon dioxide to profoundly affect the environment.The review, which is being published in the journal Science on Friday, concludes that the human-driven buildup of carbon dioxide under way now appears to be far outpacing past natural events, meaning that, for ocean chemistry particularly, the biological implications are potentially enormous — and laden with the kind of uncertainty that is hard to see as a source of comfort.
  • The beauty of looking in the rock record is you don’t have to run a computer model to see what’s going to happen. You see the whole thing. When you put say 2,000 gigatons [billion tons] or thereby of carbon into the atmosphere rapidly a certain number of things happen. It gets hot. The oceans get acid. They run short of oxygen and as a result quite a number of animals become extinct. And in the rock record what you see subsequently is the extinction event is recorded, and you see the draw-down over a period of 100,000 or 200,000 years of the carbon from the atmosphere, which is manifested on the floor of the ocean as a development of a carbon-rich mudstone. It’s just a very fine-grained rock. It’s just a stinking black mud laid down on the floor of the ocean.
  • The people who are saying to us, we’re carrying out an experiment with Earth and we don’t really know the outcome, well that sounds dramatic but strictly speaking it’s not true. Earth itself has run the experiment several times — 183 million years ago, something very comparable.The fascinating thing that seems to be emerging is, as we look at … the 1,000-year timescales going back to 183 million years, other past warming events where we get these black mudstones, we find that whatever the starting conditions, amazingly you get the same outcome. Every time you pull this particular carbon trigger at a certain rate and dump it into the atmosphere, that’s what you get.
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  • We’re not trying to set out the climatological arguments. We’re not judging the merits or demerits of those. We’re saying here’s an independent line of argument. And I’d have to say that if I have to save my life by winning an argument with oil men in a bar in Midland, Tex., on this topic, I would go in with some lumps of black mudstone from the ancient rock record, I’d go in with the established figures on our present input of carbon dioxide, and I’d say which bit of this observational science do you guys quarrel with, and why?
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Entertainment - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Why Vimeo Is the Web Video Platform to... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258450 video creativity social networks
shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Vimeo continues to be the destination for content creators and viewers looking for cutting-edge videos, beautiful playback, and a remarkably positive community. A world away from cat virals, Vimeo is winning by nurturing the next generation of filmmakers (well, videomakers) and promoting their most innovative work.
  • now videomakers can get started, at least, by making good work and letting the Internet run with it.
  • . Vimeo Staff Picks, curated by Sam Morrill and Jason Sondhi, surfaces new videos of all kinds on a daily basis, and from there, many go viral. Within 24 hours of appearing on the channel, a video can receive tens of thousands views.
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  • Especially in contrast to comments on YouTube, the conversations on Vimeo are unusually positive and constructive. This is thanks, in part, to Vimeo's role as a forum for low-budget filmmaking.
  • Since Canon released its 5D Mark II DSLR, a digital still camera with HD video, in 2008, the proliferation of inexpensive cameras has driven both an explosion in high-quality video content and a cottage industry around working with the cameras. Because DSLRs aren't optimal for video production, videomakers have had to figure out workarounds
  • video equipment is now good enough that it doesn't need to need to take center stage.
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The Secret History of Guns - Adam Winkler - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...308608
shared by Brian Zittlau on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.
  • For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.
  • Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.”
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  • Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.”
  • Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”
  • the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it. Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”
  • Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans.
  • One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.”
  • Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship.
  • As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”
  • The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.
  • In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”
  • Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.
  • The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.”
  • In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”
  • In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.
  • Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”
  • In 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.
  • True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.
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An extraordinary turn against military intervention - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...ainstmilitaryintervention.html US history politics crisis policy syria war 20th century liberal realism
shared by julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13
     
    An extraordinary turn against military intervention | Al Jazeera America The negative reaction in Congress and among the American people to President Obama's proposal of military intervention has been sharp U.S. receptiveness to Russia's proposal to sequester Syria's chemical weapons shows how eager Washington is to avoid a military response. It would, however, be something extraordinary - even historic. It would suggest that a substantial percentage of Americans believe that a proposed war is a bad idea. In the context of American history, this is almost unthinkable. War is woven into the fabric of American life, and Americans usually embrace it. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races," Roosevelt declared Advances in the technology of destruction and killing made it difficult to sustain belief in war's beauty or nobility. Because the U.S. possesses such overwhelming military force, it naturally seeks to use that force. This has led inexorably to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. American leaders have always acted on the assumption that in the end, they have recourse to all the coercive power they need to achieve any geopolitical goal. They assumed, however, that whatever problems arose, the power of the United States was so overwhelming that it would be able to resolve them. This conviction now seems to be slipping away. Public opinion surveys show scant support for bombing. Never in modern history have Americans been so doubtful about the wisdom of bombing, invading or occupying another country. American reluctance to intervene in a faraway land suggests a retreat from hubris toward reality - a creeping fear that the United States, powerful as it is, may not be able to control the effects of its foreign adventures. Generations of Americans once grew up believing not only that their country was omnipotent, but that it was an essential force for good in the world. This is an e
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Middle East Peace Talks Go On, Under the Radar - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-continue-under-the-radar.html middle east peace talks politics policy us
shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Nearly three months into the latest round of Washington-brokered peace talks in what has been the Middle East’s most intractable conflict, Mr. Kerry met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Rome on Wednesday, having said the process had “intensified” over 13 negotiating sessions, i
  • After years of stalemate, the very fact that the talks are continuing — and, perhaps even more important,
  • “In a period where the whole Middle East is moving in the direction of chaos, having one area where the parties are trying to further stabilize their relationship is a positive development,”
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  • The fact that they continue to talk means these are serious discussions. Where this goes, what’s the likely outcome, I think it’s really way too early to predict.”
  • In contrast to previous rounds of Israeli-Palestinian talks, little has leaked from the negotiating room.
  • Recent polls show scant optimism on the street. Palestinians are split, with 47 percent supporting the resumption of negotiations and 49 percent opposed, according to a September survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research; 70 percent think they will not lead to an agreement. Sixty-one percent of Israeli Jews back the talks, according to the Israel Democracy Institute’s Peace Index published this month, but 81 percent see no real chance of a deal.
  • “the negotiations are difficult but they haven’t reached a deadlock.”
  • “For both sides the current situation is very, very comfortable,” Mr. Beilin said. “All of us are playing the game. Many meetings, very serious, good relationship, all issues are on the agenda, fighting the lunatics on both sides, and it’s beautiful. The only problem is that there will be an end to it in the coming months, and the admission of failure might be devastating.” <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>
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Middle East Peace Talks Go On, Under the Radar - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-continue-under-the-radar.html
shared by Maria Delzi on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Mr. Kerry was shown saying, “I’m upping the tempo a bit more.”
  • Nearly three months into the latest round of Washington-brokered peace talks in what has been the Middle East’s most intractable conflict,
  • process had “intensified” over 13 negotiating sessions, including three in the past week. Another is scheduled for Monday.
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  • “In a period where the whole Middle East is moving in the direction of chaos, having one area where the parties are trying to further stabilize their relationship is a positive development,” said Dore Gold, a longtime Israeli diplomat and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “The fact that they continue to talk means these are serious discussions. Where this goes, what’s the likely outcome, I think it’s really way too early to predict.”
  • In contrast to previous rounds of Israeli-Palestinian talks, little has leaked from the negotiating room.
  • Palestinians are split, with 47 percent supporting the resumption of negotiations and 49 percent opposed, according to a September survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research; 70 percent think they will not lead to an agreement. Sixty-one percent of Israeli Jews back the talks, according to the Israel Democracy Institute’s Peace Index published this month, but 81 percent see no real chance of a deal.
  • “For both sides the current situation is very, very comfortable,” Mr. Beilin said. “All of us are playing the game. Many meetings, very serious, good relationship, all issues are on the agenda, fighting the lunatics on both sides, and it’s beautiful. The only problem is that there will be an end to it in the coming months, and the admission of failure might be devastating.”
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Press Adds 'What if?' to Five W's in France - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-if-to-five-ws-in-france.html france intellectual journalism
shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • “We don’t have a popular press in France at all,” said Erwann Gaucher, a media critic who directs the regional Web sites for France Télévision and teaches at the journalism school at Sciences Po in Paris, referring to a press for a broad public like those that exist in Britain and the United States. “These papers are aimed at people who are clearly part of a higher class and socio-professional category.”
  • “There is an aspect of being in a club of peers during the summer, so let’s talk about beautiful things, like a club of people who like the Enlightenment,” he said.
  • Mr. Loret of Libération added that it is something of an expectation, particularly of the well educated in France, to know some Victor Hugo poetry, some Voltaire and a smattering of the work of many other literary and philosophical figures.
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  • Mr. Gaucher sees all these efforts as an example of French journalists’ predilection for being clever and writerly, but not necessarily for producing what might elsewhere be considered good journalism.
  • “There are a lot of journalists in France who are more or less consciously writers who don’t write and here suddenly in the summer they have a bit of space, they have a bit of time to address topics that aren’t journalism anymore,” he said.
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Living in the Ring of Fire - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iving-in-the-ring-of-fire.html disaster risk earthquake tsunami
shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • The Pacific Northwest is so beautiful because of the still-active tectonic forces that have shaped it. But this summer, The New Yorker published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared. The collective anxiety has not gone away.
  • The larger question, from Seattle to Sagamore Hill, is how we fit disaster into our daily lives — a pact with the known unknown. There is no such thing as a safe place on this earth.
  • More than 90 percent of Americans live in an area with at least a moderate risk of tornadoes, or wildfires, or hurricanes, or floods, or earthquakes
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  • You gauge the odds; that’s really the crux of choosing where to live. And you hope your political leaders have the foresight to spend money on things that may not have an immediate benefit.
  • In the Northwest, these are the odds: There is a 10 to 15 percent chance of a magnitude 9 earthquake happening over the next 50 years, and a 30 percent chance of a smaller, though still enormous, collision of plates
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Hooray for Obamacare - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rugman-hooray-for-the-aca.html obamacare politics health-care results
shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.
  • what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.
  • That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.
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The Atlantic Archives: Historical Inquiry And The American Idea - The Daily Dish | By A... - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...iry-and-the-american-idea.html history judgment civics tragedy comedy wisdom
shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • "Why Study History?" The piece offers a powerful opening brief: The answer goes back to judgment, which requires more than knowing where the tools of self-government are and how to wield them. Judgment implies nothing less than wisdom–an even bigger word–about human nature and society. It takes a good sense of the tragic and of the comic to make a citizen of good judgment.
  • Tragedy, comedy, paradox and beauty are not the ordinary stuff of even the best courses in civic and government. But history, along with biography and literature, if they are well taught, cannot help but convey them.
  • The truly tough part of civic education is to prepare people for bad times.
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A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...22carbon.html climate change warming global
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • he replied to claims that global warming was a myth, declaring that the real myth was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are limitless.”
  • Bubbles of ancient air trapped by glaciers and ice sheets have been tested, and they show that over the past 800,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air oscillated between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Just before the Industrial Revolution, the level was about 280 parts per million and had been there for several thousand years.
  • carbon dioxide as the master control knob of the earth’s climate. He said that because the wobbles in the earth’s orbit were not, by themselves, big enough to cause the large changes of the ice ages, the situation made sense only when the amplification from carbon dioxide was factored in.
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  • The gas seemingly played a major role in amplifying the effects of the ice ages, which were caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit. The geologic record suggests that as the earth began cooling, the amount of carbon dioxide fell, probably because much of it got locked up in the ocean, and that fall amplified the initial cooling. Conversely, when the orbital wobble caused the earth to begin warming, a great deal of carbon dioxide escaped from the ocean, amplifying the warming.
  • Their best estimate is that if the amount of carbon dioxide doubles, the temperature of the earth will rise about five or six degrees Fahrenheit. While that may sound small given the daily and seasonal variations in the weather, the number represents an annual global average, and therefore an immense addition of heat to the planet.
  • Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook. They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet.
  • Among the most prominent of these contrarians is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who contends that as the earth initially warms, cloud patterns will shift in a way that should help to limit the heat buildup. Most climate scientists contend that little evidence supports this view,
  • China’s citizens, on average, still use less than a third of the energy per person as Americans. But with 1.3 billion people, four times as many as the United States, China is so large and is growing so quickly that it has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest overall user of energy.
  • “When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”
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The Crisis of the American Intellectual | Via Meadia - 0 views

blogs.the-american-interest.com/...s-of-the-american-intellectual intellectual crisis US
shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth.
  • the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level.  Instead of opportunities they see threats; instead of hope they see danger; instead of the possibility of progress they see the unraveling of everything beautiful and true.
  • there seem to be three big reasons why so many intellectuals today are so backward looking and reactionary.
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  • First, there’s ideology.  Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state.
  • Most American intellectuals today are still shaped by this worldview and genuinely cannot imagine an alternative vision of progress.  It is extremely difficult for such people to understand the economic forces that are making this model unsustainable and to see why so many Americans are in rebellion against this kind of state and society – but if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and the institutions of twentieth century progressivism.  The promises of the administrative state can no longer be kept and its premises no longer hold.
  • This doesn’t mean that government becomes insignificant.  The state will survive and as social life becomes more complex it will inevitably acquire new responsibilities – but it will look and act less like the administrative, bureaucratic entity of the past. 
  • Second, there are the related questions of interest and class.  Most intellectuals today still live in a guild economy.  The learned professions – lawyers, doctors, university professors, the clergy of most mainline denominations, and (aspirationally anyway) school teachers and journalists – are organized in modern day versions of the medieval guilds.  Membership in the guilds is restricted, and the self-regulated guilds do their best to uphold an ideal of service and fairness and also to defend the economic interests of the members.
  • Just as the industrial revolution broke up the manufacturing guilds, the information revolution today is breaking up the knowledge guilds. 
  • Ultimately one suspects that services once reserved for elites will be available for the masses, just as the industrial revolution enabled mass ownership of goods that had once been the preserve of small elites.  The effect will not only be to raise living standards for most people by improving their access to useful services.  It will also be to transfer power and authority from the provider of such services to the consumer.
  • Third, there’s training.  America today has many technical intellectuals – people like doctors, engineers, and others who are able to carry out complex tasks – and we are extraordinarily rich in specialist intellectuals who have a deep knowledge of a particular subject. 
  • We are much less effective at teaching and supporting people who are able to master the essentials of many complex subjects, integrate the insights from this kind of study into a coherent social or political vision, and communicate what they have learned to a broad general lay audience.  The more complex a society and the more rapidly it is changing, the more need it has for multi-disciplinary, synthesizing intellectuals who are focused on communicating serious ideas to a large audience.
  • In most of our learned professions and knowledge guilds today, promotion is linked to the needs and aspirations of the guild rather than to society at large.  Promotion in the academy is almost universally linked to the production of ever more specialized, theory-rich (and, outside the natural sciences, too often application-poor) texts, pulling the discourse in one discipline after another into increasingly self-referential black holes.  We suffer from ‘runaway guilds’: costs skyrocket in medicine, the civil service, education and the law in part because the imperatives of the guilds and the interests of their members too often triumph over the needs and interests of the wider society.
  • Right now, too many intellectuals try to turn this into a left/right debate rather than one about the past and the future.
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L'Hôte: all by yourself - 0 views

lhote.blogspot.com/...all-by-yourself.html internet online social solitude conformity
shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • "I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity." freddie7 AT gmail DOT com My brother is a tailor and dressmaker. Check him out. Blog Archive ▼  2011 (81) ▼  April (6) seriousness and honesty are only conditionally vir... all by yourself straight fire failing students drop classes reason for optimism today in unfortunate yet amazing errors, Freddie e... ►  March (30) winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow we don't have a worker shortage quote for the day "you see an old woman...." amen sympathy for the juice box set first principles an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya they should have done a miniseries about Benjamin ... next big thing anniversary note the more things change ad hominems left-wing non-interventionism sorry about comments system how perfect is your knowledge? here they come France and the UK Libya gentrification involves more than the gentry the profession that wants to destroy itself they're bringing back all the classics marijuana legalization is a human rights issue Bobby Sands was an MP damn you, DVD clearance fees links and such a man from somewhere today in insanity the incredible naivete of the incredibly savvy ►  February (33) marked bodies What does it mean for a movie to be experimental a... subversion and containment IOZ on Reason's absurdity Reihan and progressivism/neoliberalism/leftism California good people are everywhere what I want submitted without comment welcome to lottery ticket America another perfect opportunity what's before us by the way the Atlantic and the working class ►  January (12) archivedate collaps
  • Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.
  • The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.
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In Somerville, Massachusetts, a Census Asks, Are You Happy? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...01happiness.html happiness satisfaction life research survey
shared by Javier E on 02 May 11 - No Cached
  • Officials here want this Boston suburb to become the first city in the United States to systematically track people’s happiness. Like leaders in Britain, France and a few other places, they want to move beyond the traditional measures of success — economic growth — to promote policies that produce more than just material well-being
  • To draw up its questions, Somerville turned to a neighbor, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who wrote the 2006 best seller “Stumbling on Happiness.” Dr. Gilbert, who donated his time, is also helping the city do a more detailed telephone survey, using a randomized sample of Somerville’s 76,000 residents.
  • The survey that was mailed with the census asks people to rate the nuts-and-bolts aspects of their communities — the police, the schools, the availability of affordable housing — as well as the “beauty or physical setting” of Somerville, an industrial town full of triple-decker houses. The city wants to know: “Taking everything into account, how satisfied are you with Somerville as a place to live?”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Somerville officials hope to create a well-being index that they can track over time and perhaps eventually compare with results in neighboring towns (assuming the other towns follow their example).
  • For example, city officials said, the arrival of a new and long-sought extension of the Green Line light rail system to Somerville could be a natural experiment to let them track whether happiness goes up among people who live nearby.
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Will the Greece Referendum Send the Eurozone Spiralling? - Megan McArdle - Business - T... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...247728
shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • If EU economic policy were a soap opera--and apparently, it is--Greece would be the sultry, irresponsible beauty in a tumultuous love-hate relationship with rigid, authoritarian Germany.  Obviously after years of tumultuous breakups and teary reunions, this is the season finale where he finally beats the hell out of her during a screaming fight over thier impending bankruptcy, and in despair, she drives both of them, and his prize Volkswagen, off a cliff.
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Afghanistan's Worsening, and Baffling, Hunger Crisis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-baffling-hunger-crisis.html
shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Nonetheless, the numbers are still worrisome. Dr. Mohammad Dawood, a pediatrician at Bost Hospital, said there were seven or eight deaths a month there because of acute malnutrition from June through August, and five in September. Doctors around the country have reported similar rates.
  • In January 2012, for instance, Unicef and the Afghan government’s Central Statistics Organization released a survey of more than 13,000 households showing that some provinces had reached or exceeded emergency levels, with more than 10 percent acute severe child malnutrition.
  • While acute malnutrition can be fatal, chronic malnutrition can cause multiple health and developmental problems.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Unlike malnutrition crises elsewhere in the world, this one has not been connected to specific food shortages or crop failures. In addition, parents are not showing up malnourished, even when their children are.
  • His colleague Dr. Khan blamed another problem. “The main cause of malnutrition in Afghanistan is lack of breast feeding,” he said. “They see beautiful pictures of milk cartons, and they think it’s better.”
  • In addition, where women commonly have many children, often with less than a year between them, it is difficult for mothers to provide enough nourishment, by breast or bottle. Ahmed Wali, the 2-year-old Bost Hospital patient with kwashiorkor, is the ninth of 10 children of his mother, Baka Bebi, who is in her mid-30s. She weaned him onto powdered milk mixed with stream water as soon as she could.
  • Poverty is another factor. In Afghanistan, the poverty line is defined as a total income sufficient to provide 2,100 calories a day to each family member. Some 36 percent of Afghans are below that threshold, according to the Health Ministry.
  • In 2013, Unicef raised its target for providing therapeutic foods to severe acutely malnourished Afghan children, to 52,144 from 35,181. Therapeutic foods are specially made for the severely malnourished, who have difficulty digesting normal food.
  • “Managing a feeding system is difficult; there is a long way for Afghanistan to go,” he added. “But even countries like Sri Lanka, with an outstanding health system, are still struggling to manage therapeutic feeding supplies.”
  • Cases of acute severe malnutrition are running at more than 100 a month, including five to 10 deaths, at Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, and such cases have doubled since 2012, said Dr. Aqa Mohammad Shirzad, who is in charge of pediatric malnutrition programs there.
  • Each of the hospital’s 17 beds for severely malnourished patients has at least two patients, and some have three. The malnutrition intensive care ward there has an incubator that does not work, one suction pump and oxygen bottles, for respiratory masks, propped up without stands or proper connection
  • A 5-year-old boy who weighs less than 20 pounds was being treated recently on a bench because the infusion line would not stretch to a bed. Two window panes nearby were missing glass.
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Lost in the Past - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...egan-lost-in-the-past.html history US knowledge
shared by Javier E on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • Educators, not just those in thrall to teaching to “the test,” share plenty of the blame for “raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” as David McCullough called the problem
  • it’s because many schools no longer stress “civics,” or some variation of it. Why? Students complain that it’s boring, or the standards are too demanding. Civics, said Burns, is “the operating system” for citizenry; if you know how government is constructed, it’s no longer a complicated muddle, but a beautiful design.
  • Americans tended to be “ahistorical” — that is, we choose to forget the context of our past, perhaps as a way for a fractious nation of immigrants to get along.
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Ukraine's women rebels don evening gowns for glam night - Yahoo Maktoob News - 0 views

en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/owns-glam-night-175003593.html ukraine Russia International Women's Day politics
shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Yana Manuilova cuts an imposing figure in combat fatigues as a gun-toting rebel in eastern Ukraine.
  • ut to mark International Women's Day she took time out from the war to zip herself into an evening gown and compete in a beauty pageant in the rebel stronghold of Donetsk
  • "Even in my military fatigues I don't forget that I am a woman. Besides, my comrades often remind me of the fact," the 35-year-old joked.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A rebel who gave her name only as Irina said she left her job at a kindergarten to join the fight in May 2014, soon after the start of the pro-Russian insurgency against the Ukrainian government, a conflict that has claimed more than 6,000 lives.
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