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The problem with the ‘warm’ in global warming: Most like it hot

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This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With every incongruous 50-degree F day in Boston this winter, I noticed the same transformations in the people around me: Revelers shed their layers of clothing, smiled more, and made polite small talk about what a great, beautiful, or perfect day it was. I’m always on the outside looking in on these interactions. Whereas my fellow Bostonians take delight in the warm, snowless days, I find them inescapably grim this time of year. In light of what we know about climate change, I feel as though I’m clutching onto a season that is systematically disappearing from my part of the world — and that few others care.

In a report called “Most Like It Hot,” the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of Americans prefer to live in a city with a hot climate, and only 29 percent prefer cold locales. (The rest don’t have a preference.) Even human psychoses reflect this preference for warmth. Almost always, the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder are triggered during the cold, dark winter months. Only 10 percent of people with seasonal affective disorder suffer symptoms during the summer. And if you track growth in American cities since the early 1900s, a clear pattern emerges: The biggest upward trends are in places known for warmth.

I have always known that my disdain for warm weather makes me an outlier, but lately I’ve been wondering if it also has something to do with the inertia I’ve witnessed when it comes to addressing global warming — a term, by the way, that has always evoked hell to me, though maybe not to others. Although most of us are now well aware that the potential dangers of global warming go beyond weather — devastating natural disasters, famine, the reemergence of centuries-old diseases from melting permafrost — perhaps a collective preference for warmth has dulled our response to these larger threats that come with climate change. Would there be more urgency and better compliance with initiatives like the Paris Climate Agreement if we were facing the threat of an ice age instead?

It’s not a completely outlandish thought experiment. From roughly the mid-1300s to the mid-1800s, there was a prolonged period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Glaciers around the world grew robustly and average temperatures dropped by about 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) from those of the preceding Medieval period. The cooling climate struck Europe first and hardest: Reportedly, it was so cold in some areas that wild birds could be seen dropping dead out of the sky as they flew, and major European rivers like the Thames and the Rhine froze over for such significant chunks of the year that they became reliable roads for carts and horses. 1816 was famously dubbed “the year without Summer,” a dubious accolade shared by the year 1628.

So how did people respond to this onset of perpetual winter? Basically, they spent 300 years just completely freaking out. Then reason and social progress prevailed.

To most people, life during the Little Ice Age was horrible beyond measure. Catastrophes like widespread crop failure, livestock death, famine, and epidemics were common, and child mortality rates climbed. Someone had to take the blame. Witches — who, according to the Bible, had the power to bring on calamitous hailstorms and other weather-related disasters — were widely cast as scapegoats. Present-day economists have shown a correlation between the most active years in witchcraft trials and the coldest spells in the region. In May of 1626, after a brutal hailstorm in southern Germany was followed by Arctic-like temperatures, 900 men and women deemed responsible for the weather shift were tortured and executed.

But this systematic killing wasn’t changing anything, and people saw that. The cold marched on relentlessly. And so while the first half of the Little Ice Age was characterized by fanaticism, chaos, disease, death, and famine, the 18th century saw a turn toward a new, multi-pronged attempt at problem solving, spurred by the Age of Enlightenment.

Across Europe there was a broad move away from beleaguered agrarian societies, whose livelihoods were inextricably linked to practices, like small-scale farming, that climate change could easily topple. Instead, societies began to embrace institutions that were meant to imbue order, stability, reason, and understanding amid climatic chaos: science academies that explicitly excluded theologians; university systems that swelled in size; and improved roads and canals that facilitated the spread of education, medical care, and global trade. This era also saw the publication of books on science-based agricultural reform that would become virtual gospels on subjects like crop rotation, fertilization, and bumper crop storage for hundreds of years to come.

These new systems were put to the test by subsequent cold waves that continued into the 18th century and extended beyond Europe — to places like New York City, where in 1780 the harbor froze so solidly that you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Improved clothing, heat-retaining architecture, widespread international trade, and the increased knowledge about disease management coming out of the universities and science academies all worked to keep death and famine at levels far lower than those that Western societies had previously experienced.

Admittedly, the comparison between our reaction to climate change and those who came before us is imperfect; the people who lived through the Little Ice Age didn’t really understand the science behind what they were experiencing. But their passionate and sometimes extreme cultural, political, and religious responses to the effects of climate change suggest that had they been able to directly and intentionally stop global cooling, they probably would have.

Yet here we are, armed with the knowledge our forbearers were missing, having nonetheless just closed the books on the fourth-warmest year since 1880. Instead of marshalling the ingenuity of an Age of Enlightenment, as our predecessors did, we’ve spent the last few decades in an Age of Complacency.

Leo Barasi, an author who has written extensively about climate change apathy, captured a sentiment shared by many Britons after a heatwave swept through the U.K. last summer. “They believe [the heatwave] was definitely a sign of climate change, just as the science says,” he told the Independent. “But most people’s experience of it was not unequivocally awful — not like a massive forest fire or a terrible hurricane. Some people quite enjoyed it.”

Of course, the fact that most people remain unbothered by warm weather is neither the sole nor most significant reason we’re now nearing the end of the runway for wholesale mitigation of today’s climate change. It’s not that simple, and weather and climate are not one in the same.

But at the most basic human level, our gut feelings about our day-to-day experiences with weather do matter. They inform our inclinations about preserving the long-term patterns of climate — and preserving those patterns means protecting the winters that some people hate. It’s time to reckon with what that means for the future of our climate.

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The problem with the ‘warm’ in global warming: Most like it hot

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The cost of installing solar energy is going to plummet again.

Toward the end of the last ice age, about 19,000 years ago, the sea rose in several large spurts, according to a new study of coral reefs that grew during this period.

This contradicts assumptions that sea level rises gradually. Instead, coral fossils show sudden inundations followed by quieter periods. This offers new information that supports the theory that glaciers and ice sheets have “tipping points” that cause their sudden collapse along with a sudden increase in sea level.

Researchers at Rice University surveyed deep-sea coral fossils in the Gulf of Mexico, scanning their 3D structures to analyze them for growth patterns. Coral likes to live close to the surface, so it grows slowly when sea level is constant. But when sea level rises quickly, the coral grows vertically to try to stay near the surface, forming terraces.

“The coral reefs’ evolution and demise have been preserved,” lead author of the study, Pankaj Khanna, said in a press release. “Their history is written in their morphology — the shapes and forms in which they grew.”

Whether the future is written in these forms, too, remains to be seen.

Credit – 

The cost of installing solar energy is going to plummet again.

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Scott Pruitt and the White House are still bickering over his pet project: Superfund.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” he told an audience at a food summit in Milan, Italy. “When it comes to climate change, the hour is almost upon us.”

The global problems of climate change, poverty, and obesity create an imperative for agricultural innovation, Obama said. This was no small-is-beautiful, back-to-the-land, beauty-of-a-single-carrot speech. Instead, Obama argued for sweeping technological progress.

“The path to the sustainable food future will require unleashing the creative power of our best scientists, and engineers, and entrepreneurs,” he said.

In an onstage conversation with his former food czar, Sam Kass, Obama said people in richer countries should also waste less food and eat less meat. But we can’t rely on getting people to change their habits, Obama said. “No matter what, we are going to see an increase in meat consumption, just by virtue of more Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others moving into middle-income territory,” he said.

The goal, then, is to produce food, including meat, more efficiently.

To put it less Obama-like: Unleash the scientists! Free the entrepreneurs!

Source: 

Scott Pruitt and the White House are still bickering over his pet project: Superfund.

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Obama says we’ll have to speed up innovation to avoid eating our way to climate catastrophe.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” he told an audience at a food summit in Milan, Italy. “When it comes to climate change, the hour is almost upon us.”

The global problems of climate change, poverty, and obesity create an imperative for agricultural innovation, Obama said. This was no small-is-beautiful, back-to-the-land, beauty-of-a-single-carrot speech. Instead, Obama argued for sweeping technological progress.

“The path to the sustainable food future will require unleashing the creative power of our best scientists, and engineers, and entrepreneurs,” he said.

In an onstage conversation with his former food czar, Sam Kass, Obama said people in richer countries should also waste less food and eat less meat. But we can’t rely on getting people to change their habits, Obama said. “No matter what, we are going to see an increase in meat consumption, just by virtue of more Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others moving into middle-income territory,” he said.

The goal, then, is to produce food, including meat, more efficiently.

To put it less Obama-like: Unleash the scientists! Free the entrepreneurs!

Excerpt from:

Obama says we’ll have to speed up innovation to avoid eating our way to climate catastrophe.

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President Trump’s Tweets Are Not For You

Mother Jones

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Over the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted that (a) he plans to send the feds into Chicago if they don’t fix their crime problem, (b) he will be ordering a major investigation into voter fraud, and (c) he plans to start building the wall today. These all made the front page of the New York Times:

The guy is president, so I suppose this is the right thing to do. Still, I want to take yet another opportunity to remind everyone who these tweets are for. They are not for you. They are not for the press. They are not for Congress.

They are for his fans.

That’s it. Trump’s tweets often seem ridiculous or embarrassing or whatnot, but that’s only from our perspective. Instead, imagine you are Joe Sixpack. You’re at home, watching the Factor, and O’Reilly is going on about the crime problem in Chicago. It’s outrageous! The place is a war zone! Somebody should do something!

Then, a few minutes later, you see Trump’s tweet. “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible “carnage” going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!” Damn straight, you think. They need the National Guard to set things straight there. Way to go, President Trump.

Joe doesn’t really care about Chicago. He doesn’t know or care that the feds can’t be sent there to fight crime. And he probably doesn’t really want the National Guard sent to Chicago anyway. He just vaguely thinks that those thugs on the South Side need to be on the business end of some muscular action, and he wants to know that someone out there in Washington DC feels the same way he does. So that’s what Trump gives him.

I’m not here to suggest that we should devote either more or less attention to Trump’s tweets. I guess I don’t really care. I just want everyone to understand who and what they’re for. It all makes a lot more sense once you know what he’s up to.

Continued here: 

President Trump’s Tweets Are Not For You

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Did Ryan Zinke Defraud the Government?

Mother Jones

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Matthew Cole at the Intercept reports that Rep. Ryan Zinke, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of the interior, submitted several bogus travel vouchers back in the ’90s, when he was an officer at SEAL Team 6. It turns out he was traveling to Montana not to “scout for training locations,” but to renovate a house he planned to live in after he retired. He was warned to knock it off.

So far this seems pretty minor. It was nearly 20 years ago, and hardly amounted to a major felony. But then there’s this:

After Zinke was caught and warned, he continued to travel home and submit the expenses to the Navy. The offense would normally have been serious enough to have ended Zinke’s career, but senior officers at SEAL Team 6 did not formally punish him…Instead he was told he would not be allowed to return to the elite unit for future assignments, according to the sources. Zinke continued his career, and he was eventually promoted to Navy commander, the rank he retired at in 2008.

So the guy was caught, confessed, warned to stop, and then went right on doing it? If that’s really how it happened, it demonstrates a dedication to corruption a little more serious than the odd bit of expense account twiddling. I guess that makes him perfect for the Trump administration.

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Did Ryan Zinke Defraud the Government?

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Swamp Watch – 13 December 2016

Mother Jones

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Hold the presses! Cathy McMorris Rodgers will not be our next Secretary of the Interior. Instead, it will be Rep. Ryan Zinke (R–Mont.). The Washington Post explains what happened:

While Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) was a leading contender for the Interior post in recent days, Zinke hit it off with Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., an avid hunter, and met personally with the president-elect on Monday in New York City.

Okey doke.

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Swamp Watch – 13 December 2016

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Pipeline construction is on hold as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe loses one battle, wins another.

Former ACLU attorney Laura Murphy reviewed the company’s policies and platform after allegations from non-white customers that they were denied housing based on race.

Those include Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who wrote in the New York Times about being denied three Airbnb reservations in a row when planning a trip to Buenos Aires: “Because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture … it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.”

In an email to users, co-founder Brian Chesky outlined the steps Airbnb plans to take to address discrimination. As of Nov. 1, Airbnb users must agree to a “stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy.” That includes “Open Doors,” a procedure by which the company will find alternate accommodations for anyone who feels they’ve been discriminated against.

But not everyone believes Airbnb’s policy change will fully address the problem.

Rohan Gilkes, who was also denied lodging on Airbnb, says the new changes don’t go far enough. Instead, he told Grist, they need to remove users’ names and photos entirely: “It’s the only fix.”

Meanwhile, Gilkes is working to accommodate people of color and other marginalized groups: His new venture, a home-sharing platform called Innclusive, is set to launch soon.

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Pipeline construction is on hold as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe loses one battle, wins another.

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As the Potomac River rises, cherry trees planted along the sloped bank will drown, row by row.

Former ACLU attorney Laura Murphy reviewed the company’s policies and platform after allegations from non-white customers that they were denied housing based on race.

Those include Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who wrote in the New York Times about being denied three Airbnb reservations in a row when planning a trip to Buenos Aires: “Because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture … it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.”

In an email to users, co-founder Brian Chesky outlined the steps Airbnb plans to take to address discrimination. As of Nov. 1, Airbnb users must agree to a “stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy.” That includes “Open Doors,” a procedure by which the company will find alternate accommodations for anyone who feels they’ve been discriminated against.

But not everyone believes Airbnb’s policy change will fully address the problem.

Rohan Gilkes, who was also denied lodging on Airbnb, says the new changes don’t go far enough. Instead, he told Grist, they need to remove users’ names and photos entirely: “It’s the only fix.”

Meanwhile, Gilkes is working to accommodate people of color and other marginalized groups: His new venture, a home-sharing platform called Innclusive, is set to launch soon.

Read this article: 

As the Potomac River rises, cherry trees planted along the sloped bank will drown, row by row.

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We Are All Mike Pence Laughing at Donald Trump’s Outrageous Black Support Claim

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Donald Trump attempted to convince African-American voters to support his presidential campaign with the stark question: “What the hell do you have to lose?” After all, the real estate magnate reasoned, black people in America were jobless and impoverished and therefore risked nothing by rejecting his rival Hillary Clinton. Trump then announced that if he were elected president, he would secure 95 percent of the black vote by 2020.

When asked about the remarks on Monday, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, couldn’t even maintain the illusion he took Trump’s assertions seriously. Instead, during an interview with Ainsley Earhardt on Fox news, the former Indiana governor joined the general response to the GOP candidate’s claim: he laughed out loud.

When Earhardt asked why he was laughing, Pence replied, “Well, that’s Donald Trump.”

(h/t Daily Beast)

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We Are All Mike Pence Laughing at Donald Trump’s Outrageous Black Support Claim

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