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Barcelona is kicking cars off many of its streets.

According to a paper released Tuesday by former NASA director James Hansen, the landmark Paris Agreement is solid C-minus work — but when it comes to climate commitments, mediocrity is basically criminal. Slacker countries making only modest emissions reductions will lock future generations into dangerous levels of climate change.

The average global temperature is already 1 to 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, according to Hansen’s group. That’s on par with the Earth’s climate of 115,000 years ago, when the seas were 20 feet higher than they are today.

Unless we phase out fossil fuels entirely in the next few years, Hansen told reporters on Monday, future generations will have to achieve “negative emissions” by actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Seeing as we don’t even know if that’s possible, that’d be a helluva task for our progeny.

Hansen and his coauthors’ work, which is undergoing peer review, supports a lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. It charges our lawmakers with not fairly protecting the “life, liberty, and property” of future citizens by allowing fossil fuel interests to keep polluting.

But a solution is possible, Hansen explained, if we commit to a fee on carbon pollution and more investment in renewable energy.

Originally posted here:

Barcelona is kicking cars off many of its streets.

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GOP Chair of the Science and Tech Subcommittee: I Didn’t Vaccinate My Kids

Mother Jones

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican who recently became the chair of a key congressional subcommittee on science and technology, didn’t vaccinate most of his children, he told a crowd at his first town hall meeting last week.

Loudermilk was responding to a woman who asked whether he’d be looking into (discredited) allegations that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had covered up information linking vaccines to autism. He responded with a rather unscientific personal anecdote: “I believe it’s the parents’ decision whether to immunize or not…Most of our children, we didn’t immunize. They’re healthy.”

Loudermilk’s comment sparked sharp criticism, including from Rick Wilson, a prominent Republican strategist who called for the congressman’s resignation.

Having “healthy,” unvaccinated kids does not mean that they aren’t at risk, or that they won’t put others at risk later if they become infected. So far this year, there have been 154 cases of measles and three outbreaks; one outbreak sickened 86 people and landed 30 babies in home isolation. The disease spreads rapidly, afflicting not only those who lack immunization due to parental choice, but also those who haven’t been vaccinated because they are immunocompromised. Prior to the advent of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, measles was responsible for up to 500 deaths in the United States every year. Due to low vaccination rates, 2014 saw the most confirmed cases of measles since 2000, when the CDC had declared the illness all but eliminated in the United States.

If Loudermilk is unconcerned about the potential health effects of once-common diseases, he may want to note the economic repercussions. The 107 confirmed cases of measles during the 2011 outbreak cost taxpayers $5.3 million to contain. Rigorous scientific research—including the 2004 CDC study cited by Loudermilk’s constituent—has shown that theories about a supposed connection between vaccines and autism are unfounded.

The CDC study in question looked at children with and without autism to find out if there was any difference in their rates of MMR vaccination. The researchers found none. The so-called “cover-up” originated from a secretly recorded and cherry-picked conversation between William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, and Brian Hooker of Focus for Health, an organization that seeks “to put an end to the needless harm of children by vaccination and other environmental factors.” In the conversation, Thompson allowed that among African-American boys, in a small subset of children studied, the incidence of autism was higher for those who were vaccinated than those who were not. That statement landed in a wildly misleading video released on YouTube produced by Hooker and Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher whose medical license was revoked in 2010. A year later, a journal that published Wakefield’s paper linking autism and vaccines determined his findings were fraudulent.

We’ve reached out to Rep. Loudermilk for comment.

Watch the full press conference, via Georgiapolitics.org, here. (Vaccines enter the fray at 1:26:00)

View the original here – 

GOP Chair of the Science and Tech Subcommittee: I Didn’t Vaccinate My Kids

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This Is What a Troll-Free Internet Feels Like

Mother Jones

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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Femsplain is what the site doesn’t yet have: haters.

“We haven’t received a single negative comment so far,” founder Amber Gordon told me. In fact, even the comments men have left on the website, which aims to be a safe and creative forum for anyone who identifies as female, have been positive and encouraging of Femsplain’s mission.

One man reached out to Gordon, for instance, about a personal essay titled “Voluntary Interruptions,” which had encouraged readers to move away from labeling abortions as taboo. “He couldn’t understand why his sister had an abortion—him being pro-life,” Gordon recalls. “After reading this story and all the pain another woman went through, he told me he reached out to his sister, whom he hadn’t spoken to in a while, to talk about what she went through. He thanked us for making him feel welcome.”

“We are trying to create a community off Twitter,” Gordon explained. “Come to us when the world is garbage, and you can connect with similar people and do things better.” Given the unrelentingly hostile internet climate, the absence of hateful comments on a female-centric website qualifies as a temporary victory, at least, for women fed up with online harassment.

Mandi Harris wrote an essay for Femsplain about her health issues.

While last week’s frank admission from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo that he and the company “suck at abuse” may indicate that a solution to trolls is at the very least being considered, Femsplain’s fast rise in popularity—just a few months old, the site is getting more than 10,000 views weekly—suggests that women are craving more than a technological fix: They want an open community in which conversations about women can be reshaped.

Gordon’s quest to fill that void began this past October. She and three friends who met through Twitter had hoped to turn their own group text conversations into a blog called “Sad Drunk Girls.” They never followed through on it, but the idea persisted for Gordon. She coded a website with the notion that it would be a platform for themed content written largely by women. She and another friend came up with the name Femsplain.

“It’s a play on mansplain,” Gordon says. “Our goal was to reshape the way in which women are discussed, and take a word with a negative meaning into our own by redefining it and the conversation.”

Each month, Gordon and a small roster of editors put out a call for content pertaining to a broad theme such as, say, “firsts” or “desires,” and then act as curators of submissions that include everything from personal essays on sexuality and domestic violence to audio recordings about one’s first real makeout session. For December’s “Secrets & Secrecy” theme, Gordon penned her own article in which she came out as a lesbian to her friends and family. The overwhelmingly supportive comments her post received, she says, underscored “exactly why we’re doing this.”

The fledgling website already boasts a steady stable of writers and a growing audience—not to mention praise from some prominent feminists and celebs:

But Gordon has bigger ambitions. She recently left her job at Tumblr to work on Femsplain full-time. Earlier this month, she launched a Kickstarter to expand the site, finance a redesign, and pay her contributors. “We believe the content is so good, and it’s important work,” she says. “People are taking the time out of their lives to write for us and we want to compensate them.”

For the moment, Femsplain is a refreshing glimpse of what a hate-free internet could look like. But as it becomes better known, it’s pretty much inevitable that the trolls will come calling.

Gordon says the redesign will address this through a user registration system in which non-contributors will have to be a member for a certain number of days, and agree to the site’s terms of conduct, before they are allowed to post comment. “Ideally, in the future, I want to hire someone whose job is to keep our community safe,” Gordon says. “For now, we’ll block the trolls by hand.”

Continued: 

This Is What a Troll-Free Internet Feels Like

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