Tag Archives: central

Blame Spanking Advocates for Child Migrants’ Lack of Rights

by LorriKelso Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Since last fall, tens of thousands of migrant kids have streamed across the southern US border fleeing violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. When they arrive, many are held in overcrowded, unsanitary, and freezing-cold detention centers, and most are left to fend for themselves in immigration hearings because they lack legal representation. The US treatment of migrant kids might be better if the country had ratified an international treaty called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That document that would have required lawmakers to consider the “best interests of the child” in crafting policy. But despite decades of pressure from human rights activists, the United States has refused to sign on to the treaty, largely because social conservatives believe it would force Americans to give up spanking.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has long been a conservative hobby-horse, an issue seized on by conservatives fired up by home-schooling advocate Michael Farris. Farris believes, among other things, that if the United States signed the treaty, “parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children,” parents wouldn’t be able to keep their kids out of sex education, and that children could choose their own religion. Such issues are red meat for conservatives—so much so that treaty opposition is even a plank in the Iowa GOP platform. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney came out against it in 2012.

This kind of conservative opposition is one reason why the United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world that haven’t ratified the child-protection treaty. While conservatives’ fears of UN-mandated sex ed and spanking-free childhoods are largely hypothetical, the consequences of not supporting the treaty are now becoming ever more real as the US confronts the humanitarian crisis on its southern border.

Naureen Shah, a legislative counsel at the ACLU, says that if the United States had to conform to the convention’s “best interests” provision, the White House and Congress would be pressured to prioritize reuniting kids with their family members in the US, instead of rushing to deport them. Ratifying the treaty could also spur the US to improve the kids’ detention conditions so “they can get rest and access to education,” she says, as opposed to languishing in “detention conditions that are almost criminal.” Felice Gaer, the vice chair of the UN Committee Against Torture, agrees.

US law does not require undocumented children to be provided with an attorney to help them through immigration proceedings, leaving them vulnerable to judges rushing to send them back home. (President Barack Obama did recently request $15 million from Congress to provide some of the children legal counsel.) Under the treaty, children seeking asylum are supposed to be provided with legal representation, according to the panel that oversees implementation of the agreement. That’s one reason why ratifying it might “put more pressure on the State Department to take a much bigger role” to live up to these obligations, Shah says. The Obama administration has technically signed the treaty, signaling symbolic support for its child protection provisions, but the Senate has not ratified it, which would require implementing the treaty into enforceable domestic law.

Ratifying the treaty isn’t a sure-fire guarantee that migrant kids would get better treatment. After all, the United States is already in violation of other international human rights treaties it has ratified that prohibit the country from returning immigrants to countries where they will be tortured, persecuted, or killed, says Michelle Brané, an immigration detention expert at the Women’s Refugee Commission. Many of the kids crossing the US border are fleeing targeted violence. Nevertheless, “if we signed onto this children’s treaty,” the ACLU’s Shah says, “it would be even more crystal clear that the US has these obligations” to protect the child migrants. Right now, though, American politicians seem more interested in spanking kids than helping some of them.

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Blame Spanking Advocates for Child Migrants’ Lack of Rights

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Obama: "We Tortured Some Folks"

by JanessaKozak Posted on August 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, President Obama said that some of the things the United States did after 9/11 were indeed acts of torture. National Journal has the full quote:

Obama also addressed post-9/11 America in remarks about the Central Intelligence Agency. “We tortured some folks,” he said. “We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened. I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell, and the Pentagon had been hit, and a plane in Pennsylvania had fallen and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this.”

This isn’t the first time Obama has said that the US tortured people but the usage of “folks” immediately set tongues wagging. Presumably it’s because “folks” is far more humanizing than “detainees” or “enemy combatants”. The US did torture people (real flesh-and-blood human people) after 9/11, and it’s good that Obama says so—even if he was just trying to get off the topic of his CIA admitting to spying on Congress.

For a long time it was incredibly controversial to call “enhanced interrogation” torture. It’s a sign of progress that no one batted an eye at the “torture” bit and instead focused on the “folks” part. To their credit, even conservatives have come around to using the dreaded T word. Just kidding. Conservatives are freaking out:

Barack Obama is an inexperienced “celebrity” community organizer/campaigner-in-chief who won’t stop apologizing for America and was only elected president because of The Decemberists.

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Obama: "We Tortured Some Folks"

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Northern Canada is On Fire, And It’s Making Global Warming Worse

by yiszkj53 Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared at Climate Central and is reproduced here with permission.

For the past few weeks, dry and warm weather have fueled large forest fires across Canada’s remote Northwest Territories. The extent of those fires is well above average for the year to-date, and is in line with climate trends of more fires burning in the northern reaches of the globe.

Of the 186 wildfires in the Northwest Territories to-date this year, 156 of them are currently burning. That includes the Birch Creek Fire complex, which stretches over 250,000 acres.

The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.

Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates “unprecedented” in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.

A satellite image of the smoke plume from fires burning in the Northwest Territories captured on July 7, 2014. NASA Earth Observatory

The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world’s carbon stored in land, carbon that’s taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.

In addition, soot from forest fires can also darken ice in the Arctic and melt it faster. The 2012 fires in Siberia released so much soot that they helped create a shocking melt of Greenland’s ice sheet. Over the course of a few weeks in July that year, 95 percent of the surface melted. That could become a yearly occurrence by 2100 if temperatures continue to rise along with wildfire activity.

Forest in other parts of the globe are also feeling the effects of climate change. In the western U.S., wildfire season has lengthened by 75 days compared to 40 years ago. Additionally, rising temperatures and shrinking snowpack have helped drive an increase in the number of large forest fires. In Australia, fire danger is also increasing, if not the total number of fires, due to a similar trend of hotter, dryer weather.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, the current Northwest Territories fires have been fueled by hot and dry weather. Yellowknife’s June high temperatures were 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal highs while rainfall was only 15 percent of normal. Through July 15, high temperatures have been running 4 degrees Fahrenheit above July averages and the city has only seen 2 percent of its normal rainfall for the month. While these conditions can’t be tied specifically to climate change, they’re in line with those trends.

The fires have shut down parts of territory’s Highway 3, a main thoroughfare, and inundated Yellowknife with a thick haze of smoke and ash. The city’s 19,000 residents are also under a health warning. At points last week, the smoke plume was whisked south across the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and even reaching the Dakotas, 2,000 miles away.

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Northern Canada is On Fire, And It’s Making Global Warming Worse

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Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?

by PBIJannieaz Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ever since unaccompanied child migrants became a national news story six weeks ago, many people have started asking: Is this an immigration crisis, or is it a refugee crisis? In response, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said last week it hopes to designate many of the Central Americans fleeing regional violence and gang extortion as refugees.

The announcement comes amid mounting evidence of the horrific conditions causing so many people to flee Honduras, El Salvador, and parts of Guatemala: kids escaping rape, gang recruitment, and murder all around them, as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario detailed in a chilling op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times. With this new designation, the UNHCR hopes to pressure the United States to give more immigrants, including many of the 70,000-plus unaccompanied minors likely to arrive at the US border this year, political asylum.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

But if the UNHCR were to make such a move, it still would have no legal significance for the United States. So is it really that important? Yes and no, says Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission. Brané and I talked about what a “refugee” designation could mean, and other ways the US can help ease the pain for immigrants—particularly those who’ve experienced targeted violence. Here are nine key takeaways from our conversation:

1. Casting this as a “refugee situation” isn’t necessarily the important part.
“This population contains within it many children and mothers and parents bringing their children who qualify for refugee protection or for protection under international law. Whether you formally call it a ‘refugee situation’—that to me is less relevant than acknowledging that this is a population that is being driven out of their country. And their government is not willing or able to protect them.”

2. It’s not just general violence and unrest that’s causing people to flee Central America and Mexico.
“It’s true that general conditions of war or of danger are not sufficient to qualify for asylum. But the UN agency of refugees, in interviewing 400 of these children, for over an hour each, they found that 58 percent expressed a targeted fear. Not just, ‘I was scared because my neighborhood was dangerous.’ Fifty-eight percent of the kids said, ‘I received a death threat.’ Or, ‘I had a body cut up in a plastic bag left on my doorstep as a warning.’ One hundred percent come from a dangerous place. That we know. But 58 percent were targeted. That’s the piece that people are not getting.”

3. Using gang violence as grounds for international protection is not a novel idea.
“The UN committee for refugees has recognized for many years now that gang violence absolutely qualifies, depending on the circumstances, as persecution and as qualifying for status under the refugee commission. And the US has granted many claims. People talk about this being difficult to do. It is difficult, especially if you don’t have an attorney. But children with attorneys requesting asylum are winning those cases. It’s absolutely a grounds that has been accepted in the US. It’s not something revolutionary.”

4. Yes, this is a crisis—but we shouldn’t throw our hands up.
“The numbers are small if you compare them to refugee situations worldwide. Like look at Syria. There’s over a million Syrian refugees in Turkey. There’s over 2 million Syrian refugees in Jordan. Those countries are tiny compared to the US, and the numbers are much bigger. It’s absolutely our responsibility as the United States to manage this and handle it in a way that does not roll back protections. We have been the ones to stand up there and say to Turkey:’ You’ve got to take these refugees’. For us to say, because of this small number, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll reconsider,’ is crazy. It’s absolutely manageable.”

5. Very few migrants are faking persecution in order to get to stay in the United States.
“The US has excellent asylum screening procedures. The problem is, you need to beef up the system in order to accommodate these numbers. But that’s something we need to do anyway. I know there’s been a lot of allegations and concern that it’s a system that can easily be gamed, and you can fake it—but it actually it’s quite a rigorous process. There’s several screening hurdles you have to get over, and then you have to go in front of a judge, and then there’s security clearance.”

6. And many of them migrate for multiple reasons.
“When people say they have family here, yes, that’s true. But that’s not what made them come entirely. Why are they coming now? A smuggler offered them passage to the US. Is the smuggler the reason you left? Part of it. But really, the reason you were looking for a way to come, again, goes back to the violence. Poverty, also. The majority of the kids coming also are experiencing poverty in their home country. Is that the main reason? Maybe, maybe not. It’s combined.

“One interesting Vanderbilt study found that people who’d been victim of a crime were more likely to migrate than those who had not. It also found that people who feel their government is not responsive to their needs were much more likely to migrate than someone who’s government didn’t protect them. When you combine those two factors—both been a victim of a crime and felt their government couldn’t protect them—they’re exponentially more likely to migrate. It’s always a combination of factors.”

7. Requiring international protection, or refugee designation, for more migrants is the right start—but the US can’t solve this crisis alone.
“Mexico also has to acknowledge that many of these children need protection. Mexico also has very good asylum laws on the books. What they don’t have is the resources and the infrastructure to support implementing those policies. Frankly, I think one of the things the US should be doing, and could do if they talk about this in the context of a refugee crisis, is to provide support regionally, not just to Mexico but also to Belize, to Costa Rica, to Panama, all of the countries that are also seeing influxes of these children. Provide them with the support to implement their protection policies consistent with international law. And not all of these kids have to come to the US, right? The burden can sort of be shared in the region.”

8. We don’t have to wait to act until migrants get to our borders—we could process them before they leave their country.
“We’ve done that before: with the Vietnamese in the past, with Haitians, and with Cubans. The first thing that needs to happen is you have to set up what the criteria are going to be; who qualifies to be sort of preprocessed. You could limit it to kids with strong family connection to the US, who have been targeted and pass some sort of criteria. It can be done administratively. You do not need legislation to do that. And in doing it you basically cut out the smugglers. If you process the kids internally, they can get on a plane for $300 and fly over here—they don’t have to pay $3,000 to a criminal organization. It really undercuts the smugglers and trafficking operation in a huge way.

“If children see there’s a legal way that’s safer to come—without taking this horrible journey—maybe they’ll wait a little bit. And at the same time, you’re building up the child welfare system and funding safehouses and anti-corruption campaigns. Maybe they’ll see things get a little bit better; I can wait, I don’t have to leave today. You slow the flow at that end. Not just by deporting people summarily, without a hearing. If you do that, and that’s all you do, they’re going to turn right around and come back.”

9. Even if Obama’s request for emergency supplemental funding to deal with this crisis isn’t perfect, it’s better than nothing.
“While we may not agree with all the details of where some of the money is going to—it’s sort of heavy on enforcement, in my view—there’s no question that they desperately need this money in order to be able manage the situation and get a handle on it. Frankly, it needs to go through. Blocking it will make the situation worse. They won’t have any place to hold these kids while they process them, they won’t have money to process them and deport them, and they won’t have money to put them on planes and send them back. So it’s crazy that there’s discussion about blocking it.”

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Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?

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Mexican Government to Central American Migrants: No More Riding "the Beast"

by CorrineLey Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a freight train derailed in southern Mexico. It wasn’t just any cargo train, though: It was La Bestia—”the Beast”—the infamous train many Central American immigrants ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. When the Beast went off the tracks this week, some 1,300 people who’d been riding on top were stranded in Oaxaca.

How do 1,300 people fit on top of a cargo train, you ask? By crowding on like this:

Central Americans on the Beast, June 20. Rebecca Blackwell/AP

After years of turning a blind eye to what’s happening on La Bestia, the Mexican government claims it now will try to keep migrants off the trains. On Friday, Mexican Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said in a radio interview that the time had come to bring order to the rails. “We can’t keep letting them put their lives in danger,” he said. “It’s our responsibility once in our territory. The Beast is for cargo, not passengers.”

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”

The announcement comes on the heels of President Obama’s $3.7 billion emergency appropriations request to deal with the ongoing surge of unaccompanied Central American child migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border. Many Central Americans take the trains to avoid checkpoints throughout Mexico—and the robbers and kidnappers known to prey on migrants. But riding the Beast can be even more perilous. Migrants often must bribe the gangs running the train to board, and even then, the dangers are obvious: Many migrants have died falling off the train, or lost limbs after getting caught by its slicing wheels.

Why, though, hasn’t the Mexican government cracked down sooner? Adam Isacson, a regional-security expert at the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, says the responsibility of guarding the trains often has fallen to the rail companies—who usually turn around and argue that since the tracks are on government land, it should be the feds’ problem. (Notably, the train line’s concession is explicitly for freight, not passengers.)

In his radio interview, Osorio Chang also signaled a tougher stance against Central American migrants, in general. “Those who don’t have a visa to move through our country,” he said, “will be returned.”

For more of Mother Jones‘ reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

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Mexican Government to Central American Migrants: No More Riding "the Beast"

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How hot will future summers be in your city?

by RochellCullen Posted on July 10, 2014

A little slice of Saudi Arabia right at home

How hot will future summers be in your city?

By

Fancy spending a summer in Kuwait City? That’s what scientists project summers will resemble in Phoenix by the end of the century. And summertime temperatures in Boston are expected to rise 10 degrees by 2100, resembling current mid-year heat in North Miami Beach.

Thanks to this nifty new tool from Climate Central, you can not only find out what temperatures your city is expected to average by 2100 — you can compare that projected weather to current conditions in other metropolises.

The “1,001 Blistering Future Summers” interactive is based on global warming projections that assume the world takes little to no action to slow down climate change. But the nonprofit warns that even if greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced, such as through an energy revolution that replaces fossil fuel burning with solar panels and wind turbines, “U.S. cities are already locked into some amount of summer warming through the end of the century.” You might be feeling some of that warming already. Pass the ice cubes!


Source
1001 Blistering Future Summers, Climate Central

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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How hot will future summers be in your city?

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Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

by MarilouK96 Posted on June 30, 2014

Space Oddity

Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

By

JPL/NASA

The last time NASA tried to launch a satellite to measure carbon dioxide levels from space, within minutes the $273 million project plopped into the Southern Ocean (oops). Tomorrow they’re giving it another go. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 will blast off at 2:56 a.m. PDT from the Vadenburg Air Force Base in California. This time, it’ll hopefully make it to 438 miles above the planet, where it will be in a prime position to obsessively watch Earth breathe.

JPL/NASA

Which sounds stalker-esque, but don’t get too creeped out. OCO’s main goal is to figure out where, exactly, atmospheric CO2 currently comes from – and, more mysteriously, where it ends up. While fossil fuel emissions have tripled since the 1960s, levels of atmospheric CO2 have risen by less than a quarter (but unfortunately that’s still enough to cause big global change). That’s because somehow our oceans and plants have, on average, been able to keep pace with absorbing half of the total atmospheric CO2. But scientists still don’t know a lot about the dynamics of how this is happening, which leaves them wondering: How long can we expect these carbon sinks to keep sucking the stuff down?

“Understanding what controls that variability is really crucial,” OCO project manager Ralph Basilio said at a press conference in Pasadena. “If we can do that today, it might inform us about what might happen in the future.”

The satellite will carry a 300-pound instrument that measures the colors of sunlight that bounce off the earth, because that color intensity indicates how much CO2 the light beams through. While it will only take in a square mile at a time – an area smaller than New York’s Central Park – scientists say that it will tell a much more complete story of the comings and goings of atmospheric CO2 than the 150 land-based stations from which they currently get their measurements. It will collect 24 measurements a second, which means a million a day, but scientists predict that only a tenth of them (100,000/day) will be clear enough of clouds to be usable.

If they can get it up there in the first place, that is. Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on …


Source
NASA satellite to inventory climate-changing carbon from space, Reuters
NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon, The New York Times

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

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This Leading GOP Congressional Candidate Insists We Found Saddam’s WMD Program

by PenniK00bpqmwan Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

Steve Russell’s political career has largely been propelled by his Iraq War heroics. The retired Army Lt. Col., who’s vying in Tuesday’s Republican primary to run for the seat being vacated Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), led the battalion that hunted down and captured Saddam Hussein. After returning to civilian life, he barnstormed the country in support of a troop surge. He has also been one of the leading voices advancing the discredited claim that Iraq possessed an active weapons of mass destruction program at the time of the US invasion in 2003.

“He Saddam Hussein was trying to develop mass destructive weapons to include nuclear weapons,” Russell said in a 2012 speech. “The record is there. We found evidence of it even in Iraq. That’s a big misconception. Oh, there was no WMD, there was no nuclear program. That is false… They were clearly on a path to develop destructive weapons.” Russell, a former Oklahoma state senator, also made the dubious claim during this speech that the rationale for invading Iraq had little if anything to do with WMDs. “Was that the only basis for going in? No. It never was. It was never about WMD. It was about what right does one man have to defy the entire world.”

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This Leading GOP Congressional Candidate Insists We Found Saddam’s WMD Program

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

by RemonaNecaise Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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We’re hearing more and more about our pending global El Niño. NOAA now says the odds are 70 percent that we’ll have an El Niño event develop by this summer, and even higher after that. Other experts put the odds higher still. What’s more, the ocean and atmosphere have recently been behaving in a rather El Niño-like manner: Record-breaking Hurricane Amanda recently formed in the northeastern Pacific basin, which tends to be a very active hurricane region in El Niño years.

El Niño, if it develops, will upend everybody’s weather—but it may also have another impact: Driving up global temperatures. El Niño, after all, is a global weather phenomenon whose most notable characteristic is the presence of extra-warm surface water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ocean. This tends to unlock greater average global temperatures, notes Joseph Romm of Climate Progress.

Or as climate expert Michael Mann of Penn State helpfully explained by email: “Global temperature variations can be thought of as waves on a rising tide. The rising tide is global warming, which has raised global temperatures nearly a degree C (1.5 F) over the past century. The waves are the shorter-term natural fluctuations related to phenomena like El Niño (or its flip-side, La Niña), which warm (or cool) the globe, respectively, by 0.1-0.2C.”

Here’s a figure, from the World Meteorological Organization, showing global temperature anomalies since 1950, with years that began with an El Niño event already active highlighted in red. As you can see, these are some of the warmest years:

Global temperature anomalies from 1950-2013, with years beginning with El Niño conditions in red, and years beginning with La Niña conditions in blue. Note: some years may have had El Niño conditions develop mid-year, and so would not be colored. World Meteorological Organization.

What’s more, even before the recent news about the likely development of El Niño conditions, climate experts saw a chance for 2014 to be a record temperature year, simply because temperatures continue to tick upwards. “I would have said likely top 5 if asked at the beginning of this year,” says Gavin Schmidt, the newly named director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the leading scientific agencies that tracks global temperatures and ranks them by year. “And the incipient/potential El Niño strengthens that.”

“We saw record global temperatures in 1998, 2005, and again in 2010 when ongoing global warming was positively reinforced by El Niño events,” adds Mann. “There is a good chance we will see a global temperature record this year or next if a substantial El Niño event takes hold.”

That’s bad news for climate skeptics. After all, by now we’ve all heard the claim that global warming has “stopped” or is “slowing down.”

As we’ve explained before, this misleading assertion relies heavily on the fact that the year 1998 was a very, very warm year, due to a strong El Niño event. If you cherry-pick the beginning of your time series, and start with a very hot year, you can make it look as though global temperatures aren’t rising so fast. But the reality is that, as the World Meteorological Organization notes, “each of the last three decades has been warmer than the previous one, culminating with 2001-2010 as the warmest decade on record.”

But as soon as the globe sets another temperature record, the global warming “slowdown” talking point becomes a lot less compelling. At that point, climate skeptics will have a few options: Either they can finally accept the overwhelming body of evidence that global warming is real, or they can come up with a new cherry-picked counter argument. Want to guess which one they’ll choose?

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

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The CIA Finally Joins Twitter, After Years of Mining it for Intel

by ForestJarnigan Posted on June 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Central Intelligence Agency—which only recently kicked its nasty habit of torturing detainees for little or no actionable intelligence and overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments—is now officially on Twitter. The agency’s account is verified. On Friday, @CIA sent its first tweet, which reads as follows (warning—dorky spy humor ahead):

“Just remember: This is a messaging arm of a spy agency, not a silly channel for CIA Internet jokes,” PolicyMic‘s Jared Keller wrote on Friday.

The CIA finally joined the Twitterverse after years of mining it for intel. Analysts at the agency’s Open Source Center (who other agents jokingly refer to as “vengeful librarians“) sift through millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and other public data to get a sense of the collective attitudes of groups and regions overseas. The “librarians” track up to five million tweets a day. “Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center’s director, Doug Naquin,” according to an Associated Press exclusive report in November 2011.

Nowadays, the State Department is actively trolling terrorists on Twitter. Let’s see if the CIA can top that.

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The CIA Finally Joins Twitter, After Years of Mining it for Intel

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