Physicist Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley is someone I have been trying to interview for several years.
I finally got to sit down with him at December’s American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. This is just a small sampling – there is lots, lots more.
Month: February 2017
Does Tillerson Know what Exxon Knew?
Oil giant Exxon was studying climate change impacts in the 1970s and 80s, and their projections from 35 years ago accurately portray what is happening now.
Knowing what they knew, they chose to continue business as usual.
Now this astounding article in the LA Times.
A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post.
“Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.”
One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels.
Arctic Unnaturrally Warm
The Arctic is so warm and has been this warm for so long that scientists are struggling to explain it and are in disbelief. The climate of the Arctic is known to oscillate wildly, but scientists say this warmth is so extreme that humans surely have their hands in it and may well be changing how it operates.
Temperatures are far warmer than ever observed in modern records, and sea ice extent keeps setting record lows.
2016 was the warmest year on record in the Arctic, and 2017 has picked up right where it left off. “Arctic extreme (relative) warmth continues,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell Analytics, tweeted on Wednesday, referring to January’s temperatures.
Veteran Arctic climate scientists are stunned.
“[A]fter studying the Arctic and its climate for three and a half decades, I have concluded that what has happened over the last year goes beyond even the extreme,” wrote Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., in an essay for Earth magazine.
At the North Pole, the mercury has rocketed to near the melting point twice since November, and another huge flux of warmth is projected by models next week. Their simulations predict some places in the high Arctic will rise over 50 degrees above normal. Continue reading “Arctic Unnaturrally Warm”
Alternative Fact: The Holocaust Was a Chinese Plot
This is Part 1. Part 2 here:
UPDATED with commentary, above, from Haaretz of Jerusalem’s senior columnist Chemi Shalev
And yes, it’s relevant because I’ve been warning about the correlation between climate denial, racism, and fascism for years.
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“Don’t call them Deniers” was the conventional wisdom when I started this video series and blog.
“People will take it like “Holocaust Denier” – and that’s too much. It’s over the top. It allows them to play the victim.”
Well, that last part is true, Climate deniers are nothing if not drama queens.
But the idea that comparing Climate Deniers to Holocaust Deniers is somehow a bridge too far, if it ever held any credibility, has surely been put down by this current crop of Climate-Deniers-that-also-Deny-the-Holocaust now occupying the White House.
Facing growing criticism for failing to mention Jews in a statement marking the Holocaust, the Trump administration on Sunday doubled down on the controversial decision.
In a statement on Friday, President Trump broke with the bipartisan practice of past presidents by failing to include any mention of the anti-Semitic views that fueled the Holocaust and left 6 million Jews and millions of others dead.
“I don’t regret the words,” said White House chief of staff Reince Priebus when asked to defend the statement on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
“Everyone’s suffering [in] the Holocaust including obviously all of the Jewish people affected and miserable genocide that occurs— it’s something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad,” Priebus added.
Trump’s 117-word statement was issued on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Trump remembered “the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust” without specifically mentioning the attempted extermination of Jewish people.
Conservative commentator John Podhoretz slammed the White House’s defense of its actions in a column on Saturday, noting that Nazi ideology rested on the aim of exterminating Jewish people from the face of earth.
“The Nazis killed an astonishing number of people in monstrous ways and targeted certain groups—Gypsies, the mentally challenged, and open homosexuals, among others,” Podhoretz wrote. “But the Final Solution was aimed solely at the Jews. The Holocaust was about the Jews.
UPDATE:
Political statements like these are meant as a “dog whistle”, going over the heads of most listeners, but picked up by the targeted Neo-nazi groups, both in the US, and around the world. (most of which are supported by Vladimir Putin, as a means of destabilizing democracies).
America’s most punchable Neo Nazi, Richard Spencer definitely got the signal.
For Richard Spencer, the leading ideologue of the so-called “alt-right,” Donald Trump’s Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jews or anti-Semitism was an important, perhaps revolutionary, step.
Spencer dubbed it the “de-Judaification” of the Holocaust.Jewish activists, Spencer wrote in a short post for his new website Altright.com, have long insisted on making the Holocaust “all about their meta-narrative of suffering” and a way to “undergird their peculiar position in American society.”
The Holocaust, in Spencer’s eyes, has become a sort of moral bludgeon — used against white nationalists like himself.
“We can’t limit immigration, because Hitler. We can’t can’t be proud of ourselves as a Europeans, because Holocaust. White people can be Christian, but not too Christian, because Auschwitz,” he wrote.In speaking about Hitler and the Holocaust, Spencer has also elided Jewish suffering, telling the Daily Caller that “terrible things were done to many different people during that terrible war.”
He also does not outright condemn Hitler, calling him a “historical figure.” “He’s done things that I think are despicable,” Spencer told the Daily Caller, but did not go into details. “I’m not going to play this game.”
In Spencer’s eyes, the “de-Judification” of the Holocaust is a quintessentially “Trumpian” statement. Spencer championed Trump through the presidential campaign — and though he has been critical of the president at times, seems to have come around to Trump.
“Trump is a white nationalist, so to speak, he is alt-right whether he likes it or not,” Spencer in a recent interview on “The David Pakman Show.”
I’ve known this connection for years. Some of my earliest trolls were obviously Neo-nazis.
Warning: Hate speech Thumbnail.
Continue reading “Alternative Fact: The Holocaust Was a Chinese Plot”
Trump/GOP: Make Alzheimer’s Yuge. Really Yuge.
Have worked with a lot of Alzheimer’s cases. Not pretty.
But – jobs, jobs, jobs for nursing assistants.
Some of the health risks of inhaling fine and ultrafine particles are well-established, such as asthma, lung cancer, and, most recently, heart disease. But a growing body of evidence suggests that exposure can also harm the brain, accelerating cognitive aging, and may even increase risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
The link between air pollution and dementia remains controversial—even its proponents warn that more research is needed to confirm a causal connection and work out just how the particles might enter the brain and make mischief there. But a growing number of epidemiological studies from around the world, new findings from animal models and human brain imaging studies, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for modeling PM2.5 exposures have raised alarms. Indeed, in an 11-year epidemiological study to be published next week in Translational Psychiatry, USC researchers will report that living in places with PM2.5 exposures higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) standard of 12 µg/m3nearly doubled dementia risk in older women. If the finding holds up in the general population, air pollution could account for roughly 21% of dementia cases worldwide, says the study’s senior author, epidemiologist Jiu-Chiuan Chen of the Keck School of Medicine at USC.
Deepening the concerns, this month researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada reported in The Lancet that among 6.6 million people in the province of Ontario, those living within 50 meters of a major road—where levels of fine pollutants are often 10 times higher than just 150 meters away—were 12% more likely to develop dementia than people living more than 200 meters away.
The field is “very, very young,” cautions Michelle Block, a neuroscientist at Indiana University in Indianapolis. Nonetheless, it’s a “hugely exciting time” to study the connections between pollution and the brain, she says. And if real, the air pollution connection would give public health experts a tool for sharply lowering Alzheimer’s risks—a welcome prospect for a disease that is so devastating and that, for now, remains untreatable.
Demented dogs in Mexico City in the early 2000s offered the first hints that inhaling polluted air can cause neurodegeneration. Neuroscientist Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas, now at the University of Montana in Missoula, noticed that aging dogs who lived in particularly polluted areas of the city often became addled, growing disoriented and even losing the ability to recognize their owners. When the dogs died, Calderón-Garcidueñas found that their brains had more extensive extracellular deposits of the protein amyloid b—the same “plaques” associated with Alzheimer’s disease—than dogs in less polluted cities. She went on to find similarly elevated plaque levels in the brains of children and young adults from Mexico City who had died in accidents, as well as signs of inflammation such as hyperactive glia, the brain’s immune cells. Calderón-Garcidueñas’s studies didn’t have rigorous controls, or account for the fact that amyloid b plaques don’t necessarily signal dementia. But later work lent weight to her observations.
Air pollution may cause about 21 percent of cases of dementia worldwide, including Alzheimer’s disease, if a study of older women can be extended to the general population. Continue reading “Trump/GOP: Make Alzheimer’s Yuge. Really Yuge.”
David Frum: What Happens Next is Up to You.
David From is a former speechwriter for George Dubya Bush. Author of the “Axis of Evil” – a fake news legend in it’s own day.
Sobered by spectacular failure of the Iraqi venture, he’s emerged as a critic from the Right of the Trump administration.