Tag Archives: medical

Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

by RoseannSchaeffer Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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New research from the University of Texas—Austin has found that women seeking abortions in cities such as Dallas, Forth Worth, and Austin face staggering wait times of up to 20 days before they can get the procedure. The data, which researchers working for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project released Monday, provides a startling look at the effects of abortion clinic closures in Texas just as the Supreme Court is deciding whether or not to hear a case that could slash the number of remaining clinics by half.

Wait times at abortion clinics in Austin, Texas.

Researchers documented wait times for clinics in Forth Worth, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston from November 2014 to September 2015. In Austin, the average wait over the course of those 11 months was 10 days. In Dallas and Fort Worth, the annual average was 5 days. They also calculated the average monthly wait times and the range of wait times in a given month and found that average wait times within a single month reached up to 20 days in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—where there are five abortion clinics—and wait times for individual patients could reach up to 23 days.

The escalating wait times are a result of successful efforts to close more than half of Texas’s abortion clinics. Most of those clinics were closed by HB 2, a 2013 anti-abortion law that many consider to be the harshest in the nation. Its provisions included a requirement that clinics must have admitting privileges with a hospital no more than 30 miles away. Before the measure, Texas had 41 clinics; four months after it took effect, there were only 22. Today, there are 19.

A final provision of the law, which may be the subject of a Supreme Court battle later this year, would close all but 10 clinics if it goes into effect. That measure requires abortion clinics to be regulated similarly to hospitals, which makes it dramatically more expensive to operate an abortion clinic. Leading medical organizations, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, maintain this level of medical infrastructure is not necessary to safely perform most abortions. Whole Woman’s Health, a chain of abortion clinics with several providers in Texas, sued in federal court and succeeded in having the Supreme Court temporarily block the law. The court could make a decision to hear the full case as soon as this month.

A wait time of almost three weeks has serious consequences for women seeking abortions, ranging from her ability to afford an abortion, which becomes more expensive as the pregnancy progresses, to intensity of the procedure. In the second trimester, the cost of an abortion may go up by a hundred dollars every week. The researchers found that if the Supreme Court were to allow all but 10 clinics to close, it would almost double the number of second-trimester procedures in Texas—from 6,600 in 2013 to 12,400.

The researchers also predicted that if the Supreme Court upheld HB 2, the 10 clinics that would remain open would not have the capacity to meet demand. Those clinics today provide only one-fifth of abortions in Texas. If they were the only clinics in Texas, they would probably experience consistent wait times of around three weeks. For instance, the Houston area saw an average wait time of less than five days. But Houston has six clinics. If the law were fully in place, it would only have two clinics. And as clinics closed around the state, the number of abortions taking place in Houston would rise from 3,900 in 2013 to more than 11,000.

Clinics in states bordering Texas are already feeling the crush. Kathaleen Pittman, an official with Hope Medical Group of Shreveport, Louisiana, said in an interview that the proportion of Texans going to Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, Louisiana, has leapt from 15 percent of patients in 2011 to 23 percent in 2014.

And the South isn’t the only region where clinic closures have sent a wave of patients looking for new providers. The problem is also pronounced in Ohio, where eight clinics have closed since 2011. Officials for Preterm, a clinic in Cleveland, say the number of patients traveling from a different part of Ohio has jumped 160 percent, and the number of patients from out of state has almost doubled.

As Mother Jones reported in a recent feature, a clinic called the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in southern New Jersey is seeing more and more patients from Virginia, because clinics in Maryland and Delaware are overbooked, and from the Midwest, because many clinics there have closed. An analysis by Mother Jones found that clinics are closing at a rate of 1.5 per week. If the trend keeps up, the new data from Texas may turn out to be a bellwether for the rest of the nation.

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

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Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

by LeaMichalski Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Rachel Hills tells men that she wrote a book called The Sex Myth, she typically gets one response.

“Hah, sex isn’t a myth to me,” she recounts, deepening her voice in mimicry. “Yeah, you definitely get the eye roll from the men.”

But for Hills, a New York-based magazine writer, the way people talk about sex is plenty mystifying. While working as an opinion columnist in her native Australia nearly a decade ago, Hills began to notice how the media seemed obsessed with the idea that young people only wanted no-strings-attached sex—and lots of it. “What was being said about young people and sex very much did not fit my own life,” says Hills. “And I felt a sense of insecurity around that.”

She wasn’t alone, as she soon discovered by talking to hundreds of people about the topic. Over the next eight years, Hills became something of a “sexpert” through her columns for Cosmopolitan and Huffington Post. Her research culminated in her first book, The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality, which went on sale Tuesday from Simon & Schuster.

So what is the Sex Myth? For Hills, it’s the misconception that people need to be good in bed in order to be “adequate human beings.” “We internalize this idea of sex as something that is constantly available and that everyone is doing, and if you’re not doing it, there’s something wrong with you,” she explains. The book intertwines anecdotes, scientific research, and occasional moments of self-reflection to make the argument that people too often allow their sexuality to be defined by factors outside themselves.

Here are some of the other myths Hills debunks:

Myth No. 1: If you’re not having tons of sex as a young adult, there’s something wrong with you.
During her younger years, Hills writes, “sex was an unspoken assumption…I, on the other hand, had made it not only through high school a virgin, but through four years of college as well.” But research shows college students might be having less sex than we are led to believe. For example, the Online College Social Life Survey, a project out of New York University, found that 72 percent of college students “engage in some kind of hookup at least once by their senior year.” But forty percent said they hooked up with three or fewer people during their college career, and only a third of the students had engaged in intercourse during their most recent encounter. One in five students hadn’t hooked up during college at all.

Myth No. 2: Your desires aren’t normal.
Hills interviewed young adults from all types of backgrounds across Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The one thing they all had in common is that each felt that their sex life wasn’t “normal” in some way. Whether it was not reaching climax, not having sex frequently enough, expressing interests in kink, identifying as LGBTQ—no one was 100 percent sure that they were doing it “right.” Hills thinks the media plays a big role in fortifying this insecurity. Though progress has been made with shows such as Orange is the New Black and Transparent, the majority of mainstream entertainment portrays a very narrow spectrum of sexuality. “The ideal world that I’d like to see us move to, the liberated world, if you will, is the one where people aren’t made to feel shame about their sex lives, whether they’re being shamed for being considered too ‘slutty’ or ‘freaky’ or ‘weird’ or ‘prudish’ or too much of a ‘loser,'” Hills says. “So if you can remove that weight, then those decisions become less stigmatized.”

Myth No. 3: You’re not hot because Hollywood said so.
Hills points out that those who would be considered unattractive by Hollywood standards are also typically considered less sexual. Sex “serves as a proxy for our physical attractiveness and how well we fit in with the people around us,” Hills writes. The key to overcoming this attitude, she says, is introspection, and being much more critical of messaging about sex and how it applies to our own reality.

Myth No. 4: Men don’t worry about sex.
Perhaps the most surprising section of The Sex Myth is the chapter on male sexuality. Hills, a feminist, goes directly to where many feminist writers don’t—right into the hearts, rather than the hormones, of men. She writes sympathetically about unbidden erections and the pressure men face to perform sexually. “The absence of straight men from public conversations about sexuality also means that expectations of what men should do, be, and desire when it comes to sex often go unchallenged,” she writes. Hills argues that men are confined to a single definition of sexuality, which makes them “arguably more vulnerable to the Sex Myth than young women.”

The one weak spot in Hills’ analysis of male sexuality is her discussion of male sexual aggression in the context of rape culture. “The really ugly side of masculinity is a small part of it,” Hills writes. She adds that because rape is a well-covered topic at the moment, she didn’t feel compelled to dwell on it.

Myth No. 5: “Female sexual dysfunction” is all your fault.
How many jokes have been made about the female ability (and necessity) to fake an orgasm? Another aspect of the Sex Myth, as Hills describes it, is the pressure to turn pleasure into a performance. Hills thinks this impulse distracts from deeper issues. “If there’s anything ‘dysfunctional’ about our current approach to sex, it does not reside in our bodies,” she writes. But instead of drilling down on the nuances of female desire, companies would rather treat female sexual dysfunction as a problem that only medication can fix. As health journalist Ray Moynihan argued in a piece in the British Medical Journal, pharmaceutical companies are searching to “build markets for new medication” in the wake of Viagra’s financial success. Endless procedures and prescriptions have ensued, all of which lead to what one researcher describes as a “corporate-sponsored” disease.

So how best to avoid letting these myths creep into our consciousness and dictate our desires? Hills often turns to the antics of such comediennes as Amy Schumer and Tina Fey, who never shy away from sex as less-than-glamorous. “I feel like in making a joke about something, it creates permission for it,” she says. “The fact that you can say it makes it okay.”

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Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

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Health Care Spending Growth Will Rise a Bit Over the Next Decade, But Only a Bit

by silvermega-1959 Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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By coincidence, a new article in Health Affairs confirms an offhand guess I made a few days ago. I wrote, “I happen to think the slowdown in medical costs is real, and will continue for some time (though not at the extremely low rates of the past few years).” The Health Affairs researchers write: “Recent historically low growth rates in the use of medical goods and services, as well as medical prices, are expected to gradually increase. However, in part because of the impact of continued cost-sharing increases that are anticipated among health plans, the acceleration of these growth rates is expected to be modest.”

As the Wall Street Journal notes, this is is similar to what Medicare actuaries have been saying for a while:

The actuaries again Tuesday pointed to the stronger economy and aging population as the main factors in shaping Medicare’s future spending.

Prescription-drug spending, long a target of warnings from the insurance industry, drew particular attention from the actuaries, who pointed to a big rise in spending growth there as costly new specialty drugs such as Sovaldi, for hepatitis C, came on the market in 2014. Spending growth on pharmaceutical products jumped by 12.6% in 2014, up from 2.5% in 2013….In all, health care will comprise about a fifth of the U.S. economy by 2024, and the growth rate will exceed the expected average growth in gross domestic product by 1.1 percentage points.

So: good news or bad news? The bad news is that health care spending keeps increasing steadily. It’s currently about 17 percent of GDP and will increase to about 20 percent of GDP over the next decade. The good news is that this is slow growth: only about 1.1 percent higher than overall economic growth. Any other time in the past 30 years we would have killed for a growth rate that low.

There’s probably no way to avoid health care costs growing at least a little faster than the rest of the economy. We keep making advances, and our revealed preferences are pretty clear on at least one point: we value health care highly and are willing to pay more for it even at the expense of other items. That probably won’t be true forever, but it’s true for now.

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Health Care Spending Growth Will Rise a Bit Over the Next Decade, But Only a Bit

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Medicare Cost Projections Are Down Stunningly in 2015 Report

by AbdulTihtsobwxb Posted on July 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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As long as we’re on the subject of annual trustees reports, the 2015 Medicare report was released today too. And if the Social Security report was slightly good news, the Medicare report is, once again, spectacularly good news. Here’s the 75-year spending projection from ten years ago vs. today:

Ten years ago, Medicare was a runaway freight train. Spending was projected to increase indefinitely, rising to 13 percent of GDP by 2080. This year, spending is projected to slow down around 2040, and reaches only 6 percent of GDP by 2090.

Six percent! That’s half what we thought a mere decade ago. If that isn’t spectacular, I don’t know what is.

The 2005 projection was based on past performance, which showed costs rising ceaselessly every year. That turned out to be wrong. This year’s projection is also based on past performance, which shows that costs have flattened substantially since 2008. Will it turn out to be wrong too? Come back in 2025 and I’ll tell you.

In any case, this illustrates the big difference between cost projections for Social Security and Medicare. Social Security is basically just arithmetic. We know how many people are going to retire, we know how long they’re going to live, and we know how much we’re going to pay them. Do the math and you know how much the program will cost us. It can change a bit over time, as projections of things like GDP growth or immigration rates change, but that happens at the speed of molasses. There are very few surprises with Social Security.

Medicare has all that, but it also has one more thing: the actual cost of medical care. And that’s little more than an educated guess when you start projecting more than a decade ahead. Will costs skyrocket as expensive new therapies multiply? Or will costs plummet after someone invents self-sustaining nanobots that get injected at birth and keep us healthy forever at virtually no cost? I don’t know. No one knows.

Beyond that, it’s always foolish to assume that costs will rise forever just because they have in the past. Medicare is a political program, and at some point the public will decide that it’s not willing to fund it at higher levels. It’s not as if it’s on autopilot, after all. We live in a democracy, and after lots of yelling and fighting, we’ll eventually do something about rising medical costs if we simply don’t think the additional spending is worth it.

Still, the news for now is pretty good. I happen to think the slowdown in medical costs is real, and will continue for some time (though not at the extremely low rates of the past few years). For more on this, see here, here, and here. Others think it’s a temporary blip due to the recession, and big increases will return in a few years. We’ll see.

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Medicare Cost Projections Are Down Stunningly in 2015 Report

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Do You Live in a Fuck State or a Shit State?

by JeseniaYnh Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Guardian reports today on the latest work of Jack Grieve, a professor of forensic linguistics at Aston University in the UK, aided by research from Diansheng Guo and Alice Kasakoff of the University of South Carolina and Andrea Nini, of Aston University. Their research topic is this: how do people swear in different US states? Only a British newspaper could publish this, since American newspapers would never allow such family-unfriendly swill in their august pages. Hell, I may be stretching things by doing it at Mother Jones.

You can click the link for the full rundown, but you’ll be interested to know that “fuckboy” is one of the fastest rising words of 2014. It’s apparently popular in the mid-Atlantic region and in California starting just north of where I live—which explains why I’ve never heard of it.

In any case, here’s a sample of Grieve’s linguistic maps. On the left are states where “fuck” is especially popular, and on the right are states where “shit” is especially popular. California is clearly a fuck state, which fits with my observations of a lifetime. Of course, you also have some states—mostly in the polite Midwest—that don’t use either, and some—mostly the coastal areas from South Carolina up to New Jersey—where they really like them both. Fascinating, no? Certainly more interesting than the old soda-pop-coke chestnut.

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Do You Live in a Fuck State or a Shit State?

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The IMF Throws a Monkey Wrench Into the Greek Soap Opera

by RacheleBruche Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Greek drama continues. Just as it appears that Greece has capitulated to every demand short of selling off the Parthenon, one-third of the Troika1 is having second thoughts:

The International Monetary Fund threatened to withdraw support for Greece’s bailout on Tuesday unless European leaders agree to substantial debt relief, an immediate challenge to the region’s plan to rescue the country.

The aggressive stance sets up a standoff with Germany and other eurozone creditors, which have been reluctant to provide additional debt relief.

Reluctant? Yeah, I guess you could put it that way. But it would be a mite more accurate to say that it will be a cold day in hell before Angela Merkel agrees to any debt relief for Greece.

In any case, there’s a weird kabuki-like character to this whole thing. Everybody agrees that Greece will never pay back all the debt it owes. Just not gonna happen. So why don’t Greece’s creditors bite the bullet and face reality? It’s not because the Germans and others are stupid and don’t realize they’re never getting all their money back. It’s because….

Well, it’s not entirely clear why. Officially, Germany says that under EU treaties it’s illegal to forgive debt. I’m not sure anyone really believes that, though. Unofficially, no one wants to write down the debt because it’s the thing that keeps Greece under the EU lash. The only reason Europe can demand draconian austerity measures from Greece is because they can threaten to withhold the loans Greece needs to keep servicing its massive debt. This would throw Greece into default and economic chaos—which is precisely the threat that forced Greece to accept the European terms for a new bailout a few days ago.

Still, why not write down a big chunk of the debt? There would still be enough left to keep Greece under control. This is where things get even fuzzier. One answer is that it sets an uncomfortable precedent. If Greece gets a big debt writedown, why shouldn’t Portugal and Spain and Italy? Another answer is that the size of the Greek debt really does matter, if only cosmetically. Europe wants Greece to cut its spending and run a balanced budget. The bigger Greece’s debt service, the more it has to cut spending to achieve balance.

Does any of this make sense? Sure, from a certain point of view—namely that of a European public that’s fed up with Greece and doesn’t want its leaders using their tax dollars to pull Greece’s fat out of the fire. But the IMF doesn’t have to worry about European public opinion. It wants to face reality and just admit what everyone already knows. And here’s the reality. First, even with a big writedown, Greece will still be safely under the Troika’s thumb. Second, from an economist’s perspective all that matters about Greece’s finances is that it achieves primary budget balance—that is, balance not counting debt payments. So the IMF doesn’t care about squeezing the Greek budget beyond all reason based on an artificial debt number.

In any case, the IMF has supported debt relief for some time, but has only now decided to go public as a way of exerting pressure on Europe. Will it work? No telling. As always, stay tuned. The soap opera never ends.

1For those of you who haven’t been following this stuff religiously, the Troika consists of the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF. These are the three entities that Greece owes money to.

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The IMF Throws a Monkey Wrench Into the Greek Soap Opera

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Cell Phone or Porsche? Cable TV or First Class Travel? Quien Es Mas Macho?

by JermainFsm Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via Brad DeLong, I see that Matt Bruenig has finally taken on a question that’s bugged me for years. The question, in a nutshell, is this: Adjusted for inflation, would you rather live today with an income of $30,000 or back in the 1980s with an income of $60,000?1 Would the extra income be enticing enough to persuade you to give up 300 channels of high-def TV, cell phones, and universal access to the internet?

Now, the reason for asking this question usually has something to do with how we measure inflation. If you answer no—that is, you’d prefer today’s world even with a lower income—it suggests that our inflation measures are inadequate. I mean, you’re saying that $30,000 today buys more satisfaction than $60,000 in 1980 even though these are real, inflation-adjusted numbers. In other words, people today are quite a bit better off than official figures suggest. Officially, if your income had dropped in half over the past three decades, you’d be in dire shape. But in fact, this thought experiment suggests you’re actually happier. So maybe income hasn’t dropped in half in any practical sense.

This becomes meta-meta-economic very fast, so it’s best not to get wound up in it right now. Because the thing that’s always bugged me about this question is not so much its philosophical implications, but that it asks someone today what they’d think of living in the past. But that’s rigged. I grew up in the world of today. I’m accustomed to all the gadgets at hand. The idea of giving them up naturally sounds horrible.

But that’s not the only way to think of it. How about if we asked someone in 1980 about their preference. Would you rather have twice your current income, or would you rather have better TVs, portable phones, and instant access to all the information in the world? Well, these folks aren’t accustomed to all that stuff. Sure, it sounds cool, but jeez, would I really use it much? Hmmm. I think I’ll go with the extra income.

In other words, it’s all a matter of what you’re accustomed to. If you’ve been sleeping on the ground all your life, you have no trouble sleeping on the ground. Who needs a bed? If, like me, you’ve been sleeping on a bed all your life, you’d become a wreck trying to sleep on the ground. You’d pay a considerable sum of money just for an air mattress and a blanket.

Now, if you’re still reading this, you may be nodding along a bit but nonetheless thinking that it’s all just dorm room BS. We can’t go back in time and ask people about the internet and cell phones, so what’s the point of bringing it up? There are two reasons. First, I just wish more people realized that asking this question of current consumers stacks the deck and therefore doesn’t tell us nearly as much as we think it does. Second, Matt Bruenig has come up with a clever way that kinda sorta does allow us to go back in time and ask people this question.

As he points out, we have a group of people who did indeed lead adult lives in the 80s and are still with us: senior citizens. And they can decide which technologies they want to use. So what do they choose?

Using smartphone adoption as a proxy for these people’s technological preferences, it’s clear that the people who actually lived as adults through both technological periods overwhelmingly prefer older technologies:

Judging from these people’s preferences, you’d have to conclude that, in fact, older technologies are preferable to newer technologies. You don’t need a hypothetical to determine whether living in the past was better: these are people who lived in the past and the present and clearly prefer the way they lived in the past, at least when it comes to the technologies that are supposed to have made life dramatically better (as incomes stagnated).

Now, this is obviously not a bulletproof comparison. Maybe old people just get stubborn, and that’s all there is to it. Or maybe cell phones are a bad comparison. Even (or especially) senior citizens would probably be unwilling to go back to the medical technology of 1980. Plainly this is not the final answer to the tech vs. money question.

Still, it’s an interesting approach, and it would be interesting to try to extend it. Behavioral economics tells us that people respond to losses much more strongly than gains, so asking people to give up something they like really is stacking the deck—especially if they have little conception of what the extra income in 1980 would gain them. People will always react far more intensely to a sure loss than to an offer of something new.

Anyway, more like this, please. For example, how about turning this around. Which would you prefer: (a) a doubling of your income right now, or (b) a world with driverless cars, internet chips implanted in your brain, and vacation flights to the moon? For a lot of people, this would not be an obvious choice at all.

1Note that this question is normally asked with bigger numbers: say, $50,000 vs. $100,000. I lowered it because I think it makes a difference. $30,000 really starts to make you think, doesn’t it?

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Cell Phone or Porsche? Cable TV or First Class Travel? Quien Es Mas Macho?

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Actually, It Turns Out That November Is the Cruelest Month

by ZWMKlarazzttn Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been wondering why my health collapsed so badly when I turned 55, and now Science™ has provided the answer. It’s because I was born in October, which lags only November for being the net riskiest birth month. Here’s the Washington Post:

Mary Regina Boland, Nicholas Tatonetti and other researchers at the Columbia University Department of Medicine examined records for an incredible 1.75 million patients born between 1900 and 2000 who had been treated at Columbia University Medical Center. Using statistical analysis, they combed through 1,688 different diseases and found 55 that had a correlation with birth month, including ADHD, reproductive performance, asthma, eye sight and ear infections.

The researchers emphasize that other environmental factors, like diet, medical care and exercise, are more likely to influence whether you get a disease. And since these numbers are culled from New York City, they may not be applicable to babies born in other places.

Culled only from New York City, huh? And it was just a massive data mining operation looking for correlations at the 95 percent level? This suggests you’d get 84 correlations just by chance. They got 55.

So….maybe not so impressive. Then again, this is all addressed in the paper, and it’s far too complicated for me to understand. I mean, what the hell is a “multiplicity correction using FDR (α_0.05, n_1688 conditions)”? Beats me. But everything in this paper is “FDR adjusted.” So maybe that means the correlations are legit. Perhaps someone who knows what this means can weigh in in comments.

In any case, if we believe this, it explains why my sister, brother, and mother are all healthy, while I’m a basket case. I was born in the wrong month. But on the plus side, I apparently have a lower than normal risk of cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure. Good to know.

POSTSCRIPT: Everyone gets that I’m just having fun here, right? Honestly, I haven’t the slightest idea of whether this stuff holds water. Still, everyone loves simple charts that put them and their friends in buckets, right?

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Actually, It Turns Out That November Is the Cruelest Month

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Beau Biden, the Vice President’s Son, Has Died

by Natalia681 Posted on May 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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RIP:

Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III, the son of Vice President Biden and former state attorney general of Delaware, died Saturday after battling brain cancer for several years.

Biden, 46, the oldest son of the vice president and the rising star of a family dynasty, had been admitted recently to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington as he fought the cancer, a battle that his father largely kept private in the last weeks as his son clung to his life.

So sad.

Here’s the Vice President’s statement:

It is with broken hearts that Hallie, Hunter, Ashley, Jill and I announce the passing of our husband, brother and son, Beau, after he battled brain cancer with the same integrity, courage and strength he demonstrated every day of his life.

The entire Biden family is saddened beyond words. We know that Beau’s spirit will live on in all of us—especially through his brave wife, Hallie, and two remarkable children, Natalie and Hunter.

Beau’s life was defined by service to others. As a young lawyer, he worked to establish the rule of law in war-torn Kosovo. A major in the Delaware National Guard, he was an Iraq War veteran and was awarded the Bronze Star. As Delaware’s Attorney General, he fought for the powerless and made it his mission to protect children from abuse.

More than his professional accomplishments, Beau measured himself as a husband, father, son and brother. His absolute honor made him a role model for our family. Beau embodied my father’s saying that a parent knows success when his child turns out better than he did.

In the words of the Biden family: Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.

And the statement from the President:

Michelle and I are grieving tonight. Beau Biden was a friend of ours. His beloved family – Hallie, Natalie, and Hunter – are friends of ours. And Joe and Jill Biden are as good as friends get.

Beau took after Joe. He studied the law, like his dad, even choosing the same law school. He chased a life of public service, like his dad, serving in Iraq and as Delaware’s Attorney General. Like his dad, Beau was a good, big-hearted, devoutly Catholic and deeply faithful man, who made a difference in the lives of all he touched – and he lives on in their hearts.

But for all that Beau Biden achieved in his life, nothing made him prouder; nothing made him happier; nothing claimed a fuller focus of his love and devotion than his family.

Just like his dad.

Joe is one of the strongest men we’ve ever known. He’s as strong as they come, and nothing matters to him more than family. It’s one of the things we love about him. And it is a testament to Joe and Jill – to who they are – that Beau lived a life that was full; a life that mattered; a life that reflected their reverence for family.

The Bidens have more family than they know. In the Delaware they love. In the Senate Joe reveres. Across this country that he has served for more than forty years. And they have a family right here in the White House, where hundreds of hearts ache tonight – for Hallie, Natalie, and Hunter; for Joe and for Jill; for Beau’s brother, Hunter; his sister, Ashley, and for the entire Biden clan.

“I have believed the best of every man,” wrote the poet William Butler Yeats, “And find that to believe it is enough to make a bad man show him at his best or even a good man swing his lantern higher.”

Beau Biden believed the best of us all. For him, and for his family, we swing our lanterns higher.

Michelle and I humbly pray for the good Lord to watch over Beau Biden, and to protect and comfort his family here on Earth.

And this old tweet from Beau is heartbreaking:

Originally from:

Beau Biden, the Vice President’s Son, Has Died

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The future looks a lot hotter and wetter, says science

by WinifreKJKO Posted on April 28, 2015

The future looks a lot hotter and wetter, says science

By on 28 Apr 2015commentsShare

Here’s something you don’t hear climate scientists say very often:

“The bottom line is that things are not that complicated.”

That’s Reto Knutti, head of the Climate Physics Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, speaking with The New York Times. And that warm feeling inside of you is the satisfaction of knowing that you’re about to understand some science!

Take a moment to savor that feeling. Knutti is a climate scientist, after all, so we know that whatever he says next is going to be a huge downer:

“You make the world a degree or two warmer, and there will be more hot days. There will be more moisture in the atmosphere, so that must come down somewhere.”

Wow, dude — that’s not science, that’s poetry. (Except that it is science, and the subject of a new paper that Knutti and his colleague Erich M. Fischer published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change.)

Using global climate models to simulate past and future warming scenarios, the duo set out to understand how anthropogenic climate change has and will continue to increase extreme heat and precipitation events — the hotter days and wetter air that Knutti was talking about.

Here’s what they found: Compared to a world where the industrial revolution never happened, today’s warming of about 1.5 degree Fahrenheit is responsible for a 22 percent increase in the frequency of extreme precipitation events and — more dramatically — a four- to five-fold increase in the frequency of 1-in-1,000 day extreme heat events.

Projecting forward, they found that with warming kept under 3 degrees Fahrenheit, heat extremes could be 14 times more frequent than they were in pre-industrial times — which sounds bad, but not as bad as the 62-fold increase we could see if warming surpasses 5 degrees. Precipitation extremes, meanwhile, won’t increase quite as much. With 3 to 4 degrees of warming, what were 1-in-30 year events could be happening more like once every 10 or 20 years by the end of the century.

If you’re having some deja vu, it’s probably because scientists already knew about this unfortunate tie between global warming and extreme weather — but this is one of the first global forecasts predicting how these extreme events will change by the end of the century, says the Times.

All that being said — we all know better than to attribute any single weather event to climate change, right? Climate change just increases the likelihood of an event. Here’s how the Knutti and Fischer put it:

In a broader context, the approach here is reminiscent of medical studies, where it is not possible to attribute a single fatality from lung cancer to smoking. Instead, a comparison of the lung-cancer-related mortality rate in smokers with the rate in non-smokers may allow attribution of the excess mortality to smoking. Likewise, no single weather event exclusively results from anthropogenic influence in a deterministic sense but arises from complex interactions of atmospheric dynamics, local boundary layer and land-surface interaction and potentially anomalous sea-ice and ocean conditions.

Damn. I guess it’s still pretty complicated.

Source:
New Study Links Weather Extremes to Global Warming

, The New York Times.

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The future looks a lot hotter and wetter, says science

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