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Carbon Emissions Are Higher Than Ever, and Rising

Mother Jones

Yesterday was a good day for the climate movement, as over 300,000 people—according to the event’s organizers—descended on Manhattan for the biggest climate change march in history. The record-breaking turnout was a powerful sign that climate change is gaining traction in mainstream consciousness.

But even as the marchers were marching, new science was released that underscores how just how little time the world has left to break its addiction to fossil fuels. Global carbon emissions are the highest they’ve ever been, and are on the rise, according to a new climate study published in Nature Geoscience over the weekend.

The study totaled global carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production—which together account for over 90 percent of total emissions—and found that they rose 2.3 percent in 2013 to their highest level ever recorded, approximately 36.1 metric gigatons.

Emissions have been on the rise for decades, setting a new record almost every year. The rate of emissions growth has increased since the 1990s—when it was 1 percent per year—to the last decade, when the average annual growth rate has been around 3 percent. The rate of growth in 2013 was actually slower than in 2012, the study found, reflecting energy efficiency improvements in the US and Europe that have reduced the amount of carbon emitted per unit of GDP. But that obscures increasing rates of growth in emissions from China and India. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are still on pace to trigger what scientists say could be a catastrophic amount of warming, said Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter, the study’s lead author.

“China will be twice as much in 10 years,” Friedlingstein said. “We need to change the trend. There’s a need to reduce emissions in every country.”

Which brings us to the really unsettling part of this report—its attempt to pin down exactly how long we have to make that happen. Climate scientists often talk about a carbon “budget,” which is the total cumulative emissions that will lead to a specified level of global warming. To have a better-than-even chance to stay within a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit increase over 1990s temperatures, the international standard for a reasonably safe level of warming, our global carbon budget is 3,200 gigatons. Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve used up about two-thirds of that. On our current path, the study finds, we’ll use up the rest in just the next 30 years.

In other words, if the emissions trend isn’t reversed before 2045, we would have to drop immediately to zero carbon emissions on the first day of 2046. Since an instantaneous gearshift like that is obviously impossible, there’s a need to bring emissions under control in the short term. That way we can stretch the “budget” for many more years and not face a choice between catastrophic climate change or a plunge into the Dark Ages.

We’ll get an updated sense of how serious world leaders are about that goal at tomorrow’s United Nations climate summit, which is meant as a curtain-raiser for major international climate negotiations next year in Paris.

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No, of course climate change won’t make redheads go extinct

Gingers are here to stay

No, of course climate change won’t make redheads go extinct

Shutterstock

The British media landscape is lighting up with dreadful news for our most fair-skinned friends. If the Independent, Telegraph, Daily Mail, MirrorWeather Network, Huffington Post, and other outlets are to believed, climate change threatens to send red-haired folks into extinction. Extinction!

Fortunately for redheads everywhere, and for everybody who loves them, the news is less credible than a hair product manufacturer’s claim that its dyes won’t fade.

The news coverage is based on interviews by a Daily Record reporter with an anonymous source and with an official at a company that investigates customers’ genetic histories. The newspaper’s claims are based on four assumptions: (1) A single gene mutation codes for red hair and fair skin. (2) Gene mutation evolved to help Europeans soak up more sun, which is needed to produce more vitamin D in cloudy environments. (3) As the climate changes, the world will see fewer clouds. (4) As the clouds disappear, so too will the genes that helped humans adapt to cloudy environments — and the redheads who carry those genes.

But it turns out those four assumptions are either questionable, flat-out wrong, or appear to have been the result of misquotations.

Let’s start with the first claim.

“Although geneticists tend to discover individual genes that play a role in hair color and texture, often many genes play a role,” Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist who leads the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, told Grist. “So the matter may not be as simple as the decrease in a single recessive gene.”

“Physical traits like hair color can be susceptible to what is called ‘positive assortative mating’ — a complex phrase for physical attraction to those potential mates with similar features. Although it’s interesting to discuss why a particular variation, like blond hair or red hair, may have initially spread, there is almost always an element of like-attracted-to-like that may be even more important in retaining a trait in the population,” Potts said.

Now on to assumption No. 2. Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco recently published research that calls into question the long-held assumption that fair skin evolved in humans as they marched out of Africa as a means of increasing vitamin D production. “Recent studies show that dark-skinned humans make vitamin D after sun exposure as efficiently as lightly-pigmented humans,” UCSF dermatology professor Peter Elias said last month. “Osteoporosis, which can be a sign of vitamin D deficiency, is less common, rather than more common, in darkly pigmented humans.”

Third, there is considerable debate among climate scientists as to what role global warming will play in the formation of clouds.

Fourth, perhaps most importantly, the news coverage assumes, incorrectly, that modern humanity is evolving according to the kinds of environmental pressures that affected our ancient forebears. These days, with vitamin D tablets, sunscreen, roofs, and sombreros readily available, redheads and non-redheads are more or less equally likely to survive, find mates, and have healthy babies that go on to repeat the process.

Oh, and if there’s still any doubt in your mind as to whether reports of impending annihilation of redheads are utter bollocks, here’s the final coup de grâce. The Daily Record‘s sole quoted source was Alistair Moffat, managing director of the company ScotlandsDNA. When we contacted ScotlandsDNA, marketing manager Helen Moffat told us, “Alistair was misquoted in the original interview. We do not have a view on this.”


Source
Climate change could make red hair a thing of the past if Scotland gets sunnier, Daily Record

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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The Huge Campaign Finance Loophole Hillary Clinton Isn’t Using—Yet

Mother Jones

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Adam Parkhomenko had just spent a week tailing Hillary Clinton, following her halfway around the country in a Winnebago emblazoned with a now iconic photo of the former secretary of state wearing shades and texting, when I ran into him outside an auditorium on George Washington University’s campus last month. Parkhomenko—a baby-faced 28-year-old, wearing a pink button down and baseball cap—blended in amidst the millennial-heavy crowd of die-hard Hillary fans outside the event, where Clinton had just spoken about her new book. Yet Parkhomenko was an outlier. The executive director and cofounder of Ready for Hillary super-PAC—part of a trio of groups encouraging Clinton to run for president in 2016 alongside Correct the Record and Priorities USA—Parkhomenko had remained outside the theater during the entire event, skipping the chance to hear Hillary speak. As Parkhomenko—a campaign aide during Hillary Clinton’s last presidential bid—proudly told me that evening, he hasn’t seen or spoken with Hillary since 2008.

In fact, Ready for Hillary’s staff has scrupulously avoided attending any of her book tour speeches. The group has enacted what Allida Black, the group’s other cofounder, terms a “kryptonite firewall between the PAC and the candidate.” Ready for Hillary’s communications director, Seth Bringman, notes: “With her direct staff or family there is no coordination or communication. Being an independent group that’s always something made clear to everyone and it’s also commonsense.”

But it turns out these politicos don’t have to fully separate themselves from the Clinton machine. In the Wild West of post-Citizens United campaign finance law, there is a major loophole that would allow Clinton to work as closely as she likes with any of the super-PACs that are working to boost her 2016 chances. The same goes for any candidate who, like Clinton, does not hold political office and is not a declared candidate.

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The Huge Campaign Finance Loophole Hillary Clinton Isn’t Using—Yet

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Contact: Jolie Holland’s Sound Goes "Huge"

Mother Jones

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Jolie Holland in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff

Since the release of her 2003 album, Catalpa, Jolie Holland‘s music has evolved from close adaptations of pre-war blues and ballads into deeper, more complex works. Holland grew up in Houston, boxed up inside a strictly religious family. She left home after high school and was essentially homeless for more than years, squatting and bouncing between Houston, Austin, and New Orleans. In this environment, her musical education was direct and unmediatedthe music of Blind Willie McTell as influential and intoxicating as that of John Cage.

Holland has often been pigeonholed as a folk-blues-soul singer, but even from the beginning there has been something experimental and immediate about her approach. With Wine Dark Sea, her just-released sixth album, Holland exerts more control as a bandleader, setting her voice, as serpentine and wily as a rattlesnake at a Pentecostal meeting, against a more improvisational ensemble consisting of two drummers, three additional guitarists, bass and reeds. Photographer Jacob Blickenstaff spoke with Holland recently in New York City. The following is in her words.

I have a really tight relationship with the I Ching. You can see the lyrical influence all over the record. One of the basic statements of the I Ching is there’s a time when the most effective thing is to just do nothing. It’s really enormous. It’s about the flow of circumstance and of seasons. Songs like “Waiting for the Sun,” “All the Love,” and even the Joe Tex cover, “The Love You Save,” say that:

I want you to stop! Find out what’s wrong
Get it right or leave love alone
Because the love you save today
May very well be your own

Observation and engagement with ideas without explicit teachers is the global norm of how to learn things. So many people aren’t ready to go to art or music school, because it destroys their own agency in the work. I remember that feeling when I was a young teenager and was learning how to play. When you’re an undeveloped musician or artist, learning too much about theory can put the cart in front of the horse.

The voice is at the center of the compositions. You have to make sure that the band is augmenting that while expressing themselves, but at the same time not flattening out that complexity. Indigo Street takes the first solo on the record on “On and On.” When I gave her direction for that solo, I said I just wanted her to sound like she didn’t know what a guitar was, like something started a fire in her hand. I’ve been playing with her for a long time and I was trying to get her to play more noise. But with the absence of drums, it was harder for her to feel like she could go there. She said that me having a “pretty” voice held her back.

The approach on this album is more about bandleading than anything else. On past albums, I couldn’t get people to do what I wanted them to do. More volume helped; getting more people on stage and not being polite. A track like “Wine Dark Sea” is totally huge. There are no overdubs on that song, we’re playing live. To make this album we had to find the right room to get two full drum sets in with enough separation to record but still together. There are three electric guitar players in that same room. I was in the isolation booth with piano or guitar. Recording it was a real challenge. Douglas Jenkins, my co-producer, had never engineered something like that before.

We developed the sound during a weekly residency at a small place called the Jalopy Theater in Brooklyn. We’d have two drum sets on the stage and we’d go through the songs, and then we’d also have an improvisation set. I would tell stories from the book that I’m working on—true ghost stories and strange occurrences told to me by friends—and the band would play behind me so they could get used to moving together. I think some of my nerdier fans didn’t like it but fuck it. I warned them, “This is not a normal show.”

My friend Stefan Jecusco has a great saying: “It’s impossible to be sexy and nostalgic at the same time.” Most people listen to old music and they experience it as nostalgic; they can’t get inside it and don’t have a nonlinear sense of history. When I first heard Blind Willie McTell, I just had a crush on him, it just felt real even though he was speaking and playing in a different way than people do now. I hear melody in a more complicated way than other people do—so much of it comes from Blind Willie McTell. He is the guy who taught me how to sing. It’s all about microtones and internal phrases.

One thing about old songs, if we are listening to them now, then we know they’re good. They went through the filter, they stood the test of time: McTell, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Beyoncé—a good song is a good song.

With singing covers, it’s not nostalgia; it’s happening right now. Being on stage is a responsibility, an opportunity. All of these people are paying attention to you. Your present psychological experience will be affecting everyone. The more you can release your resistance to being in the present moment, the more you are providing people an opportunity to do the same. If you are playing a song that you wrote, then you are still covering that song.

I love what Tom Waits said: “We all love music, but what we all really want is music to love us.” That kind of unity in your being on stage is what has that power. ­­

“Contact” is series of portraits and conversations with musicians by Jacob Blickenstaff.

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Contact: Jolie Holland’s Sound Goes "Huge"

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Hillary Clinton Blasts the Supreme Court for Ruining Campaign Finance

Mother Jones

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton isn’t a fan of the Supreme Court’s recent penchant for eroding campaign finance law. At an event in Portland, Oregon, earlier this week Clinton joked that, if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court continues on its current path, all elections would soon be decided by a handful of wealthy benefactors.

“With the rate the Supreme Court is going, there will only be three or four people in the whole country that have to finance our entire political system by the time they are done,” she said, according to CNN, after being asked about the public perception of Congress. “Understand,” she added, “that you can be a liberal, you can be a conservative, but you want to vote for someone who understands, respects, and cherishes the Democratic process.”

Clinton’s critique of the Supreme Court was a clear reference to the justices’ ruling last week on McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. In that 5-4 decision, the court’s conservative justices tossed out the rules on aggregate limits—a total cap on the amount a donor can contribute to federal campaigns or political committees during a two-year window. While there are still limitations on donations to individual candidates, the big-time spenders are now free to cast a wide net and send money to as many candidates as they please. That decision builds off Citizens United, the marquee campaign-finance case of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, that began when an outside group created an anti-Clinton film during the 2008 campaign.

She may dislike the new rules, but Clinton has certainly benefited from the loosened campaign finance regulations that allow wealthy donors to inject ever more money into the political system. Clinton is, at least publicly, still weighing whether to run for president. “I am thinking about it,” Clinton said during a talk in San Francisco on Tuesday, “but I am going to continue to think about it for a while.” While Clinton waits to make up her mind, a vast infrastructure of super PACs has sprung up to prepare the way for her likely run. There’s Ready for Hillary, a group that’s hauled in just shy of $6 million over the past year to build a network of on-the-ground activists when Clinton launches her campaign. Priorities USA, a super PAC that originated to boost President Obama’s reelection, is preparing to blitzing the airwaves with pro-Clinton ads. That group is poised to be the outlet for Democratic donors who want to channel millions to Clinton’s cause beyond the normal restrictions. And Correct the Record, a branch of the super PAC American Bridge, is drawing funds from major donors like Steve Bing and Susie Tompkins Buell to run an opposition research and rapid response operation.

This vast shadow campaign has corralled the biggest names in Democratic fundraising into Clinton’s corner far in advance of the next presidential election. As my colleague Andy Kroll described it, Democratic politics is stuck in the Hillary Clinton Cash Freeze. Other Democrats who might want to try their hand at running for president have been shut out before they can even contemplate 2016. Hillary might not be a fan of the Supreme Court’s decisions to eviscerate campaign finance rules, but her supporters have no qualms with embracing the new wild west of money-in-politics to pave the way for her next presidential run.

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Hillary Clinton Blasts the Supreme Court for Ruining Campaign Finance

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S&P 500 Sets Yet Another Fake Record This Year

Mother Jones

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From the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. stocks kicked off the second quarter with broad gains Tuesday, propelling the S&P 500 index to a seventh record close of the year.

I’ll cop to being sort of pedantic here, but no, the S&P 500 didn’t set a record today, let alone its seventh of the year. Time series like this only make sense if you adjust for inflation, and if you do that the S&P closed 10 percent below its August 2000 peak. Granted, the S&P 500 has more than doubled since 2008, an immensely more impressive performance than, say, median income or the unemployment rate, but it’s still not in record territory.

If you’re curious to see what the real S&P 500 looks like, it’s in the chart below.

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S&P 500 Sets Yet Another Fake Record This Year

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What Are Your Favorite Comedies?

Mother Jones

They say you can tell more about a person by what he laughs at than by what he cries at. With that in mind, here are ten of my favorite film comedies in no particular order. As you can see, I basically like jokefests. There is little trace of sophistication here:

Real Genius
Life of Brian
Office Space
Groundhog Day
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Airplane!
This is Spinal Tap
Dodgeball
Galaxy Quest
The Big Lebowski

Marian and I both thought this Minute Maid commercial was funny. I remember telling her that it showed the difference in our senses of humor. I liked it for the first part; she liked it for the second part:

Among older, classic comedies, I would probably choose anything starring Cary Grant and let it go at that. What are your favorites?

JUST FOR THE RECORD: I limited my list to one film per actor/director. So only one Monty Python film, one Steve Martin film, one Abrahams/Zucker film, etc. There are no Mel Brooks films because I’m not really much of a Mel Brooks fan.

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What Are Your Favorite Comedies?

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I see London, I can’t see France : Paris bans cars, makes transit free to fight air pollution

Paris bans cars, makes transit free to fight air pollution

Evan Bench

Air pollution is about as romantic as wilted flowers, chapped lips, and corked wine, so the record-setting smog that has settled over the City of Love in the past few days is definitely dampening the mood.

Unseasonably warm weather has triggered unprecedented air pollution levels in Paris. Over the weekend, the city responded by offering free public transportation and bike sharing. (Similar measures were taken throughout nearby Belguim, which also reduced speed limits.) But that wasn’t enough to fix the problem, so Paris and 22 surrounding areas are taking more extreme steps, banning nearly half of vehicles from their roads.

Private cars and motorcycles with even registration numbers will be barred from the streets on Monday. Unless the air quality improves quickly and dramatically, odd registration numbers will be banned from the roads on Tuesday. Electric vehicles and hybrids will be exempted, as will any cars carrying at least three people. About 700 police officers will be stationed at checkpoints, handing out $31 (€22) fines to violators.

Agence France-Presse reports that Paris has tried the approach before:

Ecology Minister Philippe Martin said he understood the “difficulties, the irritation and even anger” over the move, adding: “But we just had to take this decision.”

Martin said similar measures in 1997 “had yielded results”, adding that he hoped that the number of vehicles on the roads would be “significantly lower” on Monday, without giving a figure.

Trains and buses will remain free while the car restrictions are in place, giving Parisians yet more public places where they can nuzzle and talk excitedly about government policies until the ugly smog burns off.


Source
Polluted Paris prepares for partial car ban, Agence France-Presse
Paris offers free public transport to reduce severe smog, BBC

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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Here Are Two Sentences to Ponder Over Instead of Fretting About Ukraine

Mother Jones

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I happen to have read two things that struck me in the past hour. The first is from a back-cover blurb for a book that arrived in the mail:

Mettler powerfully and convincingly demonstrates how partisan polarization and plutocratic biases have shaped _________ policy in recent years and why reform is so urgent.

I’m convinced already. Does it even matter what this book is about? You could write this sentence about practically anything these days. For the record, though, the book is Degrees of Inequality. The author is Suzanne Mettler and the second blank is “higher education.” Then there’s this:

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to great scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Bracing! This is from the introduction to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Only 544 pages to go.

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Here Are Two Sentences to Ponder Over Instead of Fretting About Ukraine

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Republicans vote to deny climate change

Republicans vote to deny climate change

House GOP

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Miss.) is among the deniers who sit on the House energy committee.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee wasted a good chunk of time Tuesday on yet more anti-environmental legislation that doesn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in climate-changed hell of becoming law. H.R. 3826, The Electricity Security and Affordability Act, would suspend the EPA’s proposed climate rules for power plants.

And for bonus points, the committee threw out an amendment to the doomed bill that would have acknowledged that climate change is real.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), presumably tired of yawning her way through anti-scientific charades, added the amendment, merely acknowledging the banal fact that greenhouse gas pollution “threatens the American public’s health and welfare” by contributing to climatic changes. Here’s ClimateProgress explaining how the Republicans responded:

[The bill] passed in Tuesday’s committee, but the amendment, which would have placed on the record that the committee accepts that climate change is happening and is caused by greenhouse gas pollution, did not.

Twenty-four E&C [Energy & Commerce Committee] members — all Republicans — voted against the amendment. Among them was E&C Chair Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), who has said before that he doesn’t think climate change is caused by human activity, and Joe Barton (R-TX), who also questions humans’ role in climate change. …

This isn’t the first time House Republicans have rejected amendments stating the reality of climate change. In 2011, House Republicans voted down amendments that called on Congress to accept that climate change is real, man-made, and a human health threat.

How could the Republicans on the energy committee be so unfathomably stupid as to continue to claim that climate change is some kind of dystopian fantasy, despite all the science to the contrary?

Maybe they aren’t stupid. Maybe there’s another explanation. “In total,” ClimateProgress reported, “the Republicans who voted to deny climate change have accepted about $9.3 million in career contributions from the oil, gas, and coal industries.”


Source
24 House Republicans Just Voted To Deny The Reality Of Climate Change, ClimateProgress

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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Republicans vote to deny climate change

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