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What These Climate Scientists Said About Earth’s Future Will Terrify You

by 0c4g78x Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

I grew up planning for my future, wondering which college I would attend, what to study, and later on, where to work, which articles to write, what my next book might be, how to pay a mortgage, and which mountaineering trip I might like to take next.

Now, I wonder about the future of our planet. During a recent visit with my eight-year-old niece and 10- and 12-year-old nephews, I stopped myself from asking them what they wanted to do when they grew up, or any of the future-oriented questions I used to ask myself. I did so because the reality of their generation may be that questions like where they will work could be replaced by: Where will they get their fresh water? What food will be available? And what parts of their country and the rest of the world will still be habitable?


How much should you worry about an Arctic methane bomb? The Climate Desk interviewed leading experts skeptical of the threat.

The reason, of course, is climate change—and just how bad it might be came home to me in the summer of 2010. I was climbing Mount Rainier in Washington State, taking the same route I had used in a 1994 ascent. Instead of experiencing the metal tips of the crampons attached to my boots crunching into the ice of a glacier, I was aware that, at high altitudes, they were still scraping against exposed volcanic rock. In the pre-dawn night, sparks shot from my steps.

The route had changed dramatically enough to stun me. I paused at one point to glance down the steep cliffs at a glacier bathed in soft moonlight 100 meters below. It took my breath away when I realized that I was looking at what was left of the enormous glacier I’d climbed in 1994, the one that—right at this spot—had left those crampons crunching on ice. I stopped in my tracks, breathing the rarefied air of such altitudes, my mind working hard to grasp the climate-change-induced drama that had unfolded since I was last at that spot.

I haven’t returned to Mount Rainier to see just how much further that glacier has receded in the last few years, but recently I went on a search to find out just how bad it might turn out to be. I discovered a set of perfectly serious scientists—not the majority of all climate scientists by any means, but thoughtful outliers—who suggest that it isn’t just really, really bad; it’s catastrophic. Some of them even think that, if the record ongoing releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, are aided and abetted by massive releases of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, life as we humans have known it might be at an end on this planet. They fear that we may be at—and over—a climate change precipice hair-raisingly quickly.

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What These Climate Scientists Said About Earth’s Future Will Terrify You

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Raw Data: Inflation Is Going Down, Down, Down

by ElvinVerpmtaxda Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Via the Wall Street Journal, here’s how inflation has been doing over the past year. Long story short, it’s been declining steadily since the end of 2012 and is now running at about a 1 percent annual rate. Bottom line: we should be worried about unemployment, not inflation. Until the labor market gets tighter, inflation just isn’t likely to be any kind of serious problem.

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Raw Data: Inflation Is Going Down, Down, Down

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It’s Hard for a White Guy to Get Himself Arrested

by Megan Smith Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at The Atlantic, a former prosecutor named Bobby Constantino has a piece called “I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System.” It’s oddly riveting. It starts with a description of his former career:

In between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed — shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings — I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs. Last year, I got myself arrested in New York City and found out.

In a nutshell, this guy desperately tried to get himself arrested for walking around New York City with a stencil and a spray can (a class B misdemeanor) and had no luck. So he tagged City Hall. With a surveillance camera recording him. Still no luck. He turned himself in. They turned him away. He literally found it impossible to get arrested.

He finally succeeded, spent a night in jail, and went to court. And then just the opposite happened. He was initially sentenced to five days community service until the prosecutor suddenly realized the case file was flagged “no deal.” So he went back to court, and this time they insisted on throwing the book at him. The judge was so pissed off at him that he then doubled the book.

There’s more, and it’s worth a read. A white guy in a suit, it turns out, is practically invulnerable to being arrested. But when he uses this fact to embarrass the judicial system, the judicial system suddenly turns on him with a fury. Welcome to America.

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It’s Hard for a White Guy to Get Himself Arrested

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Elizabeth Warren Introduces Bill to Prevent Employers From Discriminating Against Poor People

by Junepps1b Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and six of her colleagues in the Senate introduced a bill that would prevent employers from using credit checks in the hiring process, a practice that disproportionately hurts poor people.

Over the past few decades, credit reporting bureaus have begun selling their services not just to lenders, but to a wide range of employers. Forty-seven percent of employers check applicants’ credit history as an indicator of their employability, according to a 2012 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. But research shows that a person’s credit score has nothing to do with her likelihood of succeeding in the workplace. The Equal Employment for All Act—co-sponsored by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)—would prohibit the judging of applicants by this metric.

“A bad credit rating is far more often the result of unexpected medical costs, unemployment, economic downturns, or other bad breaks than it is a reflection on an individual’s character or abilities,” Warren said. “Families have not fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and too many Americans are still searching for jobs. This is about basic fairness—let people compete on the merits, not on whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills.”

The bill, which is backed by over 40 community, financial reform, labor and civil rights organizations, would be a boon for low-wage workers, minority communities, and women. Credit checks used in the hiring process disproportionately disqualify people of color. Divorce tends to hit women’s finances harder than men’s, and women are also more likely to receive subprime loans than men.

Chi Chi Wu, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston, told the New York Times in May that most of the people who contacted her group complaining that they’d been denied a job because of poor credit were low-wage workers applying to big retail chains. “Someone loses their job,” she said, “so they can’t pay their bills—and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.”

There is ample support for the senators’ bill. In 2011, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced a similar bill in the House. Nine states have adopted legislation that curbs the use of credit reports to in the hiring process.

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Elizabeth Warren Introduces Bill to Prevent Employers From Discriminating Against Poor People

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Guess Who Gets the Most Brazen Federal Inflation Adjustment in the Country?

by JamaalChampagne Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

I learned something new today. Apparently the federal government has a cap on the amount it’s willing to reimburse contractors for the salaries of their employees. If someone makes $50,000 per year, no problem. You can charge the feds for their entire salary if they’re working on government business. But if your company’s CEO makes $3 million per year, you can’t charge it all back to the feds even if 100 percent of the CEO’s time is spent on government contracts. The limit, set in 1998, was $340,000.

This cap was allowed to rise with inflation, so you’d figure that by 2011 it would be around $467,000. But no. It was $763,000. Why? Because ordinary inflation adjustments are for chumps, that’s why. For purposes of charging CEO overhead to the federal government, the cap was set at “the median amount of the compensation provided for the five most highly compensated employees of all publicly owned U.S. corporations with annual sales in excess of $50 million for the most recent fiscal year.”

Isn’t that fabulous? When it comes to the minimum wage, we don’t index for inflation at all. But for CEOs earning top-one-percent pay, we not only index for inflation, we index to the rise in CEO salaries. And since CEOs have been relentlessly voting themselves ever more astronomical compensation over the past few decades, we know that number is going to rise a whole lot faster than piddly old CPI. Ka-ching.

This comes via Lydia DePillis, who’d like to talk about raising the compensation floor, not just cutting the CEO cap back down to size. Good luck with that.

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Guess Who Gets the Most Brazen Federal Inflation Adjustment in the Country?

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Yes, It Really Just Snowed in Egypt (Even If That Sphinx Photo Is Fake)

by Casey Wood Posted on December 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yesterday Twitter was lit up by images of a snowy Egypt. Like this one:

The cause, according to the Weather Underground, was a stalled area of low pressure.

However, there were also more dubious tweets, especially of this image:

According to some sleuthing by Buzzfeed, that image actually seems to be of a theme park in Japan—where snow would be decidedly less extraordinary—that contains a sphinx replica.

Meanwhile, just how rare is snow in Egypt, anyway? Capital Weather Gang and New York Magazine have called into question assertions that it has not occurred in 112 years. Still, snow is extremely uncommon—as is rain, for that matter: According to Wunderground, Cairo receives less than an inch of rain per year.

And what of the global warming snark? Actually not that far off: The snowy weather does seem tied to a weirdly behaving jet stream, and one prominent scientific idea of late is that global warming is interfering with the jet stream, leading to “stuck” weather and all kinds of extremes.

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Yes, It Really Just Snowed in Egypt (Even If That Sphinx Photo Is Fake)

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 December 2013

by sssaa Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Gizmodo tells us today that squirrels were first introduced into urban parks by Philadelphia in 1847. Everyone loved it and the idea soon spread:

Central Park led the way in the second wave of squirrels introduced into American cities….Feeding the squirrels became a past time during these years, and was eventually seen by naturalists and conservationists as a way to help humans learn how to better treat animals….So next time you see a squirrel in the park, drink it in. These little critters were put there for your entertainment. But perhaps more importantly, they were put there to remind us of how man and nature must get along, even if it takes a little effort.

The little critters are everywhere now. One in particular has taken up residence in my backyard for some reason. I don’t think there’s anything to eat there, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Is he burying acorns there or something? It would be a pretty good spot, I suppose, since Domino doesn’t go outside much anymore and wouldn’t know what to do with a squirrel if she saw one. Especially in the winter, she much prefers burrowing under a nice, warm quilt. Today’s sample is another double Irish chain design, twin-sized, machine pieced and machine quilted. It nursed me back to health earlier this week when I headed downstairs during a bout of insomnia, so perhaps it has wonderful medicinal qualities too. Who knows?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 December 2013

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Democrats Plan to Fight For Unemployment Benefits in January

by Shelley9010 Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent reports on the latest Democratic plan to get Republicans to agree to extend unemployment benefits:

Dems who are pushing for an extension have hatched a new plan to do just that: Once Congress returns, they will refuse to support the reauthorization of the farm bill — which will almost certainly need Dem support to pass the House — unless Republicans agree to restart unemployment benefits with the farm bill’s savings.

“Under no circumstances should we support the farm bill unless Republicans agree to use the savings from it to extend unemployment insurance,” Dem Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a top party strategist, told me today. “This is a potential pressure point. We’re going to have to resolve differences in the farm bill because otherwise milk prices will spike. If past is prologue, they are going to need a good chunk of Democrats to pass the farm bill.”

Good. In normal times, of course, all the usual arguments against extending benefits would be pretty compelling. It really would provide a disincentive to go out and find work. But today, when there are three or four job seekers for every job available, that’s just not an issue. People aren’t unemployed for long periods because they’re lazy. They’re unemployed because they can’t find a job. Lots of them are married and college educated. As AEI’s Michael Strain points out, “Someone who has been unemployed for 30 or 35 or 40 weeks, and is in their prime earning years with kids and education … It strikes me as implausible that this person is engaged in a half-hearted job search.”

Even lots of conservatives agree that we should continue to extend unemployment benefits as long as the job market remains anemic. This really shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

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Democrats Plan to Fight For Unemployment Benefits in January

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After the Sequester, the Pentagon Gets a Reprieve

by HiramDerry Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yesterday’s budget deal doesn’t spare the Pentagon from the full impact of the sequester cuts, but it sure eases the impact considerably. As things stand now, the inflation-adjusted defense budget is still bigger than it was in 2001, before the 9/11 buildup, and shows no signs of ever coming back down to that level. The chart below tells the story:

This is part of “Can’t Touch This,” a detailed look at the Pentagon budget from our upcoming print edition. The story it tells is pretty simple: the defense budget skyrocketed after 9/11 and never fully returned to its pre-war level. The base budget (which doesn’t count the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan) ran to about $1,400 per person in 2001, and by the end of this decade, nearly 20 years after 9/11, it will still be over $1,600 per person.

In past wars, we usually got a peace dividend afterward as spending returned to its old level. It happened after Vietnam and it happened after the Cold War. But this time it’s stalled. Spending is down a bit from its Bush-era peak, but only a bit. The war on terror, apparently, really is a forever war.

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After the Sequester, the Pentagon Gets a Reprieve

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The Tea Party Takes One On the Chin

by ChiquitaMadiraz Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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We have a budget:

In their final action of the year, the House approved the budget 332 to 94, with 169 Republicans and 163 Democrats voting in favor….

Not bad! I guessed “at least 150 Republican votes,” and we got 169. And with that, I shall retire from the vote-counting game. This is likely to be my high point.

So is this the beginning of the end for the tea party, as their frothing charges of treason earned them nothing but a dressing down from John Boehner and the rest of the House leadership? Or does crossing the tea party just make Boehner and Ryan and the rest more vulnerable to future shakedowns? Stay tuned.

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The Tea Party Takes One On the Chin

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