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Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

By on 28 Oct 2015 6:33 amcommentsShare

As a general rule, climate hawks are not jumping for joy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a new trade deal between the U.S. and some Asian and Pacific nations. On Tuesday, in an interview with Democracy Now!, Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz gave them another reason to worry: He argued that certain provisions in the TPP would allow polluters to sue governments for setting carbon emission limits.

“This is a trade agreement that has all kinds of provisions intended to restrict regulations,” Stiglitz told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman.

As an example of the absurdity of these types of provisions, Stiglitz cited Philip Morris suing Uruguay in 2010 under a different treaty. Uruguay had implemented a regulation that required tobacco companies to append health warnings to cigarette cartons  — similar to what we have in the United States — and Philip Morris sued the country for a loss in expected profits. “In other words,” Stiglitz said, “the view is, they have the right to kill people, and if you want to take away that right, you have to pay them not to kill.”

The Columbia University economist warned that the TPP could spur similar litigation over climate regulations. “We know we’re going to need regulations to restrict the emissions of carbon,” argued Stiglitz. “But under these provisions, corporations can sue the government, including the American government, by the way, so all the governments in the TPP can be sued for the loss of profits as a result of the regulations that restrict their ability to emit carbon emissions that lead to global warming.”

Writing for Project Syndicate earlier this month, Stiglitz explained that corporate interests argue these types of provisions are “necessary to protect property rights where the rule of law and credible courts are lacking.” But he calls that argument “nonsense,” especially in the case of regulations formulated to target industries whose “profits are made from causing public harm.”

Watch the Democracy Now! video:

Source:

Joseph Stiglitz: Under TPP, Polluters Could Sue U.S. For Setting Carbon Emissions Limits

, Democracy Now!.

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Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

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Can This Social Network Make You Less Anxious?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Rob Morris started his PhD in media arts and sciences at MIT without having taken a single computer science class—”which, in retrospect, was really one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done,” he says. Scrambling to keep up with classmates who had far more coding experience, he found himself spending a lot of time on Stack Overflow, an online forum where programmers help each other write and debug code. He got better, but he couldn’t stop stressing out about what he saw as his inferior skills. Then he had an idea: “Just as we can get a crowd of people to help us find and fix bugs in our code, perhaps we can get people to help us fix bugs in our thinking.”

That insight led Morris to develop Panoply, an online tool that crowdsources treatment for depression and anxiety, which he’s now turning into a consumer app. (Currently the app, which is called Koko, is invite-only; prospective users can sign up here.) People with depression and anxiety often have irrational thought patterns that cause them to perceive normal situations in a distorted, often negative way. To break those thought patterns, Panoply relies on a technique that psychologists call cognitive reappraisal.

When a user is upset—say she’s lost her job and she doesn’t feel like she’ll ever find another one, or her roommate walked past without saying hi and she thinks he’s angry at her—she posts a description of the situation as she perceives it. Then other users point out specific ways in which she might be falling into distorted patterns of thinking and try to help her reframe the situation. Maybe the right job just hasn’t come along yet; maybe the roommate had a bad day at work and just doesn’t feel like talking.

A study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research this week suggests that Panoply’s engagement tactics—and its overall approach to improving mental health—are effective. Of 166 study participants who had previously exhibited symptoms of depression, those who spent three weeks using Panoply for at least 25 minutes a week ended up significantly less depressed and better at cognitive reappraisal than those who spent three weeks doing an expressive writing exercise, a typical treatment for depression.

Morris teamed up with Stephen Schueller, a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University, to design Panoply. But he has his own background in psychology: He majored in it as an undergraduate at Princeton, and he briefly worked in a clinic after college. He says he came to MIT knowing that he wanted to use technology to educate people about psychological health, especially people who wouldn’t or couldn’t seek traditional therapy.

A screenshot of Panoply. (Click to enlarge) Courtesy of MIT

Panoply wasn’t Morris’ first approach. “Being at the MIT Media Lab, you’re surrounded by so many crazy futuristic toys,” he says. “There’s a group next to mine that just has all these robots walking around and interacting with people. Of course I thought, I can steal one of those robots and create a robot therapist that follows you around.” He settled on creating a social network instead when he realized that copying the addictive qualities of Facebook and Twitter could solve a problem with existing mental health apps: There’s nothing to keep users coming back day after day. “They feel a bit like homework,” he says.

Like other social networks, Panoply pings users every time someone comments on one of their posts. Morris hopes the community-building aspect of the site will keep people engaged. “It’s a really powerful feeling to spend a few minutes thinking really hard about how to write two to three sentences to help someone and then finding out that you made someone feel better,” he says.

Still, Morris says he plans to roll out the mobile app slowly, in part so that he can ensure it won’t be plagued by trolls. He already has some safeguards in place. Every time someone posts a response, Mechanical Turk workers get paid a penny each to determine whether it passes certain criteria before it goes live. In addition, algorithms search the text of each post and quarantine those that feature potentially offensive words or phrases.

Even though the study of Panoply focused on depression symptoms, Morris says he doesn’t want to pigeonhole his app as “a depression app.” He prefers the term “stress-reduction app,” because he worries that stigma around the word “depression” will drive potential users away. He wants people to feel like they can use the app even if they don’t have a diagnosed mental health condition, if they’re just having a bad day. “I think in our society we spend a ton of attention on fitness and how to eat,” he says. “Not so much on emotional well-being.”

Link:

Can This Social Network Make You Less Anxious?

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Scientists Dissected the Brains of 79 NFL Players. What They Found Is Disturbing.

Mother Jones

Yesterday, the country’s leading investigators of sports-related brain injuries released what could be their most shocking finding yet: Of the 79 deceased NFL players examined, 76 showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. The researchers at the Boston University CTE Center have examined, in total, the brains of 128 people who played football at all levels—from high school to the pros—and 101 showed evidence of CTE. The numbers buttress a growing body of evidence that suggests that playing football at any level can lead to grave health consequences.

In case you haven’t been following the story, here’s how CTE works: When the brain is subjected to repeated trauma—from the severe (and rare) concussion-causing hits to the repetitive, smaller impacts a lineman might absorb thousands of times in his career—its tissue starts to deteriorate. That causes the buildup of abnormal tau proteins, which interfere with a whole host of critical brain functions. In the short term, it can lead to memory loss and impaired judgment; in the long term, it can lead to severe depression and dementia. Ex-players describe its symptoms as crushing, and in many cases, the pain, unpredictable outbursts of rage, and memory loss becomes too much to bear.

Three images of brain tissue, with tau protein in brown. The left sample is from a nonplayer subject, the middle comes from a football player, and the right belongs to a boxer. Courtesy of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

In the past few years, several former NFL players have committed suicide and were later found to have had CTE. On Monday, researchers found that Jovan Belcher—the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker who killed his girlfriend and himself in 2012—also had been suffering from CTE.

Two decades ago, when players began to link their health problems with their football careers, the NFL denied the prevalence and severity of brain injuries. In the 2000s, the league’s (now-defunct, and poorly named) Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee frequently stated that not one NFL player suffered from chronic brain damage. In 2009, years after the first player had been diagnosed with CTE, Dr. Ann McKee—a leading Boston University researcher—presented her findings before an NFL committee, which reportedly attacked the scientific rigor of her research. Meanwhile, right-wing media like Breitbart have been downplaying CTE and attacking doctors’ credibility for years, often referring to their work as “junk science.”

Currently, there’s no way to definitively know if a living player has CTE. (Traumatic brain injury, which may lead to CTE, can be identified in living people.) Leading researchers are the first to point out that their sample population is skewed: Brain bank donations come disproportionately from players who suspected they had CTE while alive. CTE sufferers who commit suicide have tended to shoot themselves in the chest; in some cases, they’ve left notes asking that their brains be used for research.

Still, the more CTE researchers study players’ brains, the grimmer the findings get. While they admit the shortcomings of their research, CTE experts overwhelmingly insist that football increases risk of traumatic brain injury. The outcry has pushed the NFL to backpedal on its previous position: It recently opted to settle in a massive class action suit filed by former players suffering from CTE-like symptoms. It will likely pay out hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. An internal study commissioned by the NFL found that 30 percent of players will develop brain trauma complications sooner, and more frequently, than the general population. (The league didn’t dispute the findings.)

Just how the developing research will affect other levels of football remains to be seen. The hit sustained by University of Michigan quarterback Shane Morris last weekend—and coach Brady Hoke’s decision to let him keep playing—was shocking.

We know the NFL has a brain injury problem. Given the outcry over what happened to Morris—and the $70 million concussion settlement the NCAA reached in July—it’s obvious that college football does too.

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Scientists Dissected the Brains of 79 NFL Players. What They Found Is Disturbing.

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

Mother Jones

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Over at 538, Benjamin Morris asks “Just How Bad Were the Bad Boys?” The bad boys in question are the Detroit Pistons basketball team of the late 80s, who had a reputation for being unusually aggressive on the court. Did they deserve their reputation? To test this, Morris looks at how many technical fouls they racked up, a good measure of unsportsmanlike conduct. In fact, he takes a look at the total number of technical fouls for the entire league, and finds that the number rose steadily until 1995 and then started a long-term decline.

I promise this is just for fun, but I’ve overlaid another line against Morris’s chart. Not a perfect fit, granted, but not too far off, either. I’m sure a few of you can guess what it is, can’t you?

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

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Older trees best at fighting climate change

Older trees best at fighting climate change

mindgrow

As humans age, we tend to pass more gas. As trees age, they tend to suck more of it up.

A new paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature has blown away old misconceptions about the roles that the most mature trees in forests play in combating climate change.

It has long been believed that younger trees are better than their older neighbors at absorbing carbon dioxide. But the new research suggests that the opposite is true. It turns out that big trees just keep on growing, at fast rates, and the growth depends on carbon that the trees draw from the air around them.

“In whatever forest you look at, be it old or new growth, it is the largest trees that are the greater carbon sinks,” William Morris, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, told Grist. “Not the smaller, younger trees, as was previously thought.”

Morris and dozens of other scientists studied data related to 673,046 trees belonging to 403 tree species in managed and wild forests across the world. For 96.8 percent of species studied, they found that each tree drew more carbon dioxide out the air each year than it did the year before. The carbon is used to produce leaves, roots, and wood. From the paper:

In absolute terms, trees 100 cm in trunk diameter typically add from 10 kg to 200 kg of aboveground dry mass each year (depending on species), averaging 103 kg per year. This is nearly three times the rate for trees of the same species at 50 cm in diameter, and is the mass equivalent to adding an entirely new tree of 10–20 cm in diameter to the forest each year.

The findings don’t contradict the prevailing notion that young forests are better overall at sucking up CO2 than are old-growth forests. That’s because younger forests contain so many more trees.

That said, it’s still best for the climate that we leave those aging stands in place because cutting them down would unleash the carbon they spent their lifetimes absorbing. “One must take into account the amount of carbon the forests are storing as well as how much they are fixing,” Morris said.


Source
Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size, Nature

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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Older trees best at fighting climate change

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