Winter may be coldest in 1000 years
BRITAIN’S winter is the coldest since 1683 and close to being the chilliest in nearly 1,000 years.
Latest figures reveal that the average temperature since December 1 has been a perishing -1C.
That makes it the second coldest since records began in 1659.
THURSDAY, Dec. 9 (HealthDay News) -- Life expectancy dipped slightly in the United States from 2007 to 2008, according to a new federal report -- the first decline of its type in 25 years.
Life expectancy for Americans in general declined by a little more than one month, from 77.9 to 77.8 years.
Whoever heard in life expectancy dropping anywhere, anytime in the last 100 years? It seems to be too early yet to suss out the reasons. But this bears watching. You have to wonder if the failing U.S. health care isn't partly behind it.
"You have about 5 percent of the market that is green and committed to fuel efficiency," said Mike Jackson, the chief executive of AutoNation, the largest auto retailer in the country. "But the other 95 percent will give up an extra 5 mpg in fuel economy for a better cup holder."
-- Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post
Der Spiegel:
The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.
-- Why Germans Think the U.S. is Insane
The target audience of denialism is the lay audience, not scientists. It's made up to look like science, but it's PR. (David Archer)
- from jules-klimaat.blogspot.com
"A Christmas miracle: The gods gave us the Immaculate Reception"
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 25, 2010.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10359/1113052-109.stm
Very religious Americans are more likely to practice healthy behaviors than those who are moderately religious or nonreligious....We've seen these kind of result before.... But I never know what to make of them.
Very religious Americans make healthier choices than their moderately religious and nonreligious counterparts across all four of the Healthy Behavior Index metrics, including smoking, healthy eating, and regular exercise. Smoking is one area of particular differentiation between the very religious and less religious Americans, with the nonreligious 85% more likely to be smokers than those who are very religious.
It is evident that time segments of a few decades or shorter can exhibit either warming or cooling trends, while trends for longer segments are mostly positive, though quite weak compared to those present in shorter segments.
"Generally speaking, the smarter move is to invest in the Tiffanys of the world—and shop at the Wal-Marts."
-- Brett Arends, Why I Don't Want an iPad for Christmas, Wall Street Journal
Disasters from the Earth, such as earthquakes and volcanoes "are pretty much constant," said Andreas Schraft, vice president of catastrophic perils for the Geneva-based insurance giant Swiss Re. "All the change that's made is man-made.""Through Nov. 30, nearly 260,000 people died in natural disasters in 2010, compared to 15,000 in 2009, according to Swiss Re. The World Health Organization, which hasn't updated its figures past Sept. 30, is just shy of 250,000. By comparison, deaths from terrorism from 1968 to 2009 were less than 115,000, according to reports by the U.S. State Department and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory."
In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past 15 years combined.More:
The excessive amount of extreme weather that dominated 2010 is a classic sign of man-made global warming that climate scientists have long warned about. They calculate that the killer Russian heat wave - setting a national record of 111 degrees - would happen once every 100,000 years without global warming.There are lots more interesting facts in the article.
Hansen feels the need to explain why GISS is high in the midst of frigid air
I was working on a general report yesterday, but in checking background for it, I discovered this recent missive from Dr. Hansen. I suppose when your agency is the “odd man out”, you feel a need to explain yourself. Note the difference in November 2010 global temperature anomaly metrics:
UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°CApparently it never occurred to Watts to actually compare the numbers scientifically -- that is, to note that GISS's baseline is 1951-1980 and UAH's baseline is 1981-2010. So it's little wonder that GISS gets a higher number.
In April 2001 the Portland City Council under the leadership of Mayor Vera Katz approved an aggressive plan aimed to combat global warming by decreasing carbon emissions by 10% from their 1990 levels by 2010, thus making Portland an icon in the renewable energy movement. An important part of this plan mandated that the City of Portland acquire one hundred percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2010. This would be accomplished through the purchase of renewable energy certificates (RECs) from public utility companies, renewable energy installations at city and county facilities and the sponsorship of local renewable energy projects. Nine years later the City of Portland has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of a government-led push for renewables by utterly failing to achieve its goal of 100% renewable energy. As of 2010 only 9% of the Portland city government’s power comes from renewable energy sources.Via the Oregonian, via a report by the (free market) Cascade Policy Institute.
"You have been negotiating all my life," 21-year-old Mima Haider of Lebanon told delegates at the United Nations climate negotiations in Cancún. "You cannot tell me you need more time."
-- from "The Cancun Compromise" by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation, Dec 16, 2010
"A male 20-year-old today can expect to spend 5.8 years over the rest of his life without basic mobility, compared to 3.8 years a decade ago — an additional two years unable to walk up ten steps or sit for two hours. A female 20-year-old can expect 9.8 years without mobility, compared to 7.3 years a decade ago.
"There is substantial evidence that we have done little to date to eliminate or delay disease while we have prevented death from diseases," Crimmins explained. "At the same time, there have been substantial increases in the incidences of certain chronic diseases, specifically, diabetes."
The Atlandtic: Wikileaks vs the growing culture of official secrecy & stilling of public discourse http://bit.ly/et2XWq In context with Wikileaks vs habitual secrecy, Wash Post. "Top Secret America". http://wapo.st/f4dT4j Bill Moyer's Journal. Rick Karr on Government Secrecy (video). http://to.pbs.org/fHTuZi More on the growth of gov. secrecy. Bill Moyer's Journal - The Need to Know. http://to.pbs.org/9kJeLn RT @DanielEllsberg EVERY attack now made on Assange and @wikileaks was made against me and release of Pentagon Papers http://bit.ly/eZnep8 RT @wired Military bans disks, threatens courts-martial to stop new #WikiLeaks - http://wrd.tw/gTYgoL RT @fastcompany With @WikiLeaks Looming Large, @StateDept Announces Hosting of Press Freedom Event http://bit.ly/grzkYG Infoworld: WikiLeaks persists despite massive, multifaceted attacks http://bit.ly/gIzsyH
“You are complete joy to me,” Mrs. Edward wrote. “I hope you will always know that. Wherever I am, wherever you are, I have my arms wrapped around you.”
-- Elizabeth Edwards, letter to her children
"You can't just spend a weekend with an Excel spreadsheet and issue comments. I wanted to make sure that what we were passing out was scientifically vetted." (Oregonian, Nov 27, 2010).
In "Tron: Legacy," which opens Dec. 17, 61-year-old actor Jeff Bridges will play Kevin Flynn, at his natural age, and a computerized avatar called "Clu," who hasn't aged since around the time he was first created in the original Tron in 1982.
Clu bears Bridges' face, altered to make him about 35 years old, but it's grafted onto a younger actor's body.
While it may be eerie for audiences to see a new performance from a younger-looking Bridges, it was no less strange for the actor himself.
"It's bizarre. It's great news for me, because now it means I can play myself at any age," Bridges said.I am not so sure. I think audiences like seeing actors they are familiar with play different roles, and they like seeing their evolution over time. They don't want to see them playing roles they should have played 30 years ago.
Almost certainly, as individuals, scientists are responsible for an order of magnitude more greenhouse gas emissions than the average global citizen, in large part due to travel associated with our scientific interactions, presentations, and service to the scientific community....
Scientists must lead the charge against “business as usual” by demonstrating a different way of doing business. The technology is available, and it is time for us to find ways to promote scientific progress without contributing so substantially to the climate change problem we study.
-- "Travel Trade-Offs for Scientists," Ingrid C Burke, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Science v 330, 10 Dec 2010, p 1476
Watching official China stomp and whine after the Nobel Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo is really quite amusing (and, as well, rather sad). They seem like a six-year old -- or, rather, like any bully who ever lived. James Fallows nails it:"If the Chinese people ... don't know why this prize should be given to Liu Xiaobo, now they should understand."
In many respects, information has never been so free. There are more ways to spread more ideas to more people than at any moment in history. Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.
During his visit to China in November, President Obama held a town hall meeting with an online component to highlight the importance of the internet. In response to a question that was sent in over the internet, he defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity. The United States' belief in that truth is what brings me here today.
After the European settlement, strange ideas about "manifest destiny" were used as an excuse to push Native Americans from their land. Later, in the antebellum South, some preachers routinely endorsed the thesis that slavery, American-style, was endorsed by God. Today's "exceptionalists" are really no different, a theologian's equivalent of the child in the backseat telling his sister that "Mom likes me better than you!"
God doesn't play favorites among nations. Any "exceptionalism" in the United States is because of the character of her people and a structure of government which doesn't pick sides in theological debates either. When we start thinking that God is patting us on the head more regularly, we'll be "exceptional" only for our vanity and pride.
"Far from the oceans acidifying, their pH currently ranges between 7.9 and 8.3, putting them very firmly on the alkaline side of the threshold, at 7.0."This is just unbelievably stupid. I can't even believe even Booker thinks this is an accurate description of ocean acidification, which is, of course, about the ocean's pH getting lower, regardless of its starting point.
The U.S.government is doing the same thing to Wikileaks that the Chinese government did to Google.
"Re: Wikileaks - In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble."
Anything said or done in the name of democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global.
It is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets. Were there some overriding national jeopardy in revealing them, greater restraint might be in order. There is no such overriding jeopardy, except from the policies themselves as revealed. Where it is doing the right thing, a great power should be robust against embarrassment.
"First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small," he said, referring to how much energy is produced in the process.
The U.S. ethanol industry will consume about 41 percent of the U.S. corn crop this year, or 15 percent of the global corn crop, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.
Gore explained his own support for the original program on his presidential ambitions.
"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president" in 2000."This is a noble proclamation -- but no less damaging. Gore did exactly what so many have accused climate skeptics/deniers of doing -- taking a position for political and/or economic gain.
Earl Woods understood golf is a solitary game played across the 5½-inch course between your ears. So that's where he set out to make his son unbeatable.
China acknowledged on Tuesday that it is the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, as it called on the United States to ensure climate change talks opening next week make progress.
For an American historian who researches totalitarianism and genocide, nothing is more disheartening than facile comparisons sometimes heard between Western leaders and Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. When we are so wrong about history, we do a great injustice to ourselves.
The Stalin comparison rests on a basic misunderstanding of the history of communism. Americans often seem to think that social reforms are somehow steps toward communism. History tells a different story.
...Had Barack Obama been born in Nazi Germany, of one white and one African parent, he would have been sterilized. His election as president was actually one of the strongest refutations ever offered to Nazi ideology.
It goes without saying that Hitler and Stalin controlled parties that opposed democracy and legitimated themselves by ideology, propaganda and force rather than free elections. In both the Nazi and Stalinist cases, the rise to power required violence, and the sustenance of the regime more violence.
That some people would compare their own peacefully elected president to ideological mass murderers is a sign of reckless and shameful disregard for some of the most important lessons of history.
-- Timothy Snyder, NY Times, 11/16/10
“The earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth,” he said. “This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”
“I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for his creation,” he said.
“If we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?” he asked a committee witness. “We could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.”
The Montreal Protocol has already delayed climate change by 7-12 years."
-- Mario Molina, UC San Diego, quoted in Environmental Science &Technology, Jan 1, 2010
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
-- Yogi Berra
So any scientist walking into this context had better be ready for one obvious trap: Being lured into talking about uncertainty to the detriment of what we actually know. It’s easy to ask a scientist a question that will invite a large volume of caveats and doubt-generating statements without leaving much time to discuss what’s firm, what we can rely on. A question like, “what are the limitations of existing climate models?” You get the picture.
Mankind, is it responsible for global warming? Well I'll tell you something. I have seen evidence on both sides of it. I'm skeptical -- I'm skeptical. And you know, I think at the at the end of this, I think we're going to need more science to prove something one way or the other. But you know - cause I've seen arguments on both sides of it that at times - like I'll watch something about man made global warming, and I go wow, that's fairly convincing. And then I'll go out and watch the other side of the argument, and I go huh, that's fairly convincing too. So, I go to be honest with you, I don't know. And that's probably one of the reason's why I became a lawyer, and not a doctor, or an engineer, or a scientist, because I can't figure this stuff out. But I would say at this point, that has to be proven, and I'm a little skeptical about it. Thank you.
The lesson to be gleamed from Pittsburgh isn’t so much in what steps it’s taken on its way to recovery. Rather, the lesson to be learned from Pittsburgh is what happened to its Great Recession hit in 1983.
It failed. The steel collapse decimated Pittsburgh and its region, taking with it nearly 1 out of every 10 jobs there. Entire towns surrounding the city became obsolete. But it is because of that failure, that absolute bottoming-out, that Pittsburgh has been able to cast aside its past and emerge as a unique showcase of what a small, bustling, connected American city can eventually become.
WASHINGTON- An article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, and then picked up by media outlets far and wide, misrepresents the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a climate science project the AGU is about to relaunch. The project, called Climate Q&A Service, aims simply to provide accurate scientific answers to questions from journalists about climate
science.
"In contrast to what has been reported in the LA Times and elsewhere, there is no campaign by AGU against climate skeptics or congressional conservatives," says Christine McEntee, Executive Director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union. "AGU will continue to provide accuratescientific information on Earth and space topics to inform the general public and to support sound public policy development."
..."AGU is a scientific society, not an advocacy organization," says climate scientist and AGU President Michael J. McPhaden. "The organization is committed to promoting scientific discovery and to disseminating to the scientific community, policy makers, the media, and the public, peer-reviewed scientific findings across a broad range of Earth and space sciences."
At a rally to celebrate his election victory, however, the Democratic former governor also made it clear that environmental protection -- often a wedge issue between Oregon's urban and rural communities -- would return as a hallmark of his new administration....This is especially quotable:
While Kitzhaber said his goal is to "create that political center" that can tackle the state's long list of recession-caused troubles, the jeans-and-boots-wearing white-water rafter asserted himself once again as the chief steward of the state's natural bounty.
In addition to tipping his hat to job-seekers and school children, he thanked "everyone who sees our state and recognizes its natural wonder, and knows it's worth fighting for, and that it's a legacy to be passed on to future generations. It's your victory, too.
"The challenges aren't blue, the challenges aren't red," Kitzhaber said. "Hell, they're green."It's almost embarrassing to say, but it's nice to have a governor who actually believes what scientists are saying (for decades now).
Some 300 candidates nationally have signed the Tea Party "Contract from America" calling for a balanced budget, radical simplification of the tax code, and strict limits on federal spending. The chance that any of those will come to pass in the next two years? Zero.
Our campaigns are generally a matter of theater, not to be taken literally. We like to be the kind of people who vote for drastic change, but we don't want to be the kind of people who actually experience it. The gesture is generally enough.
The great physicist Enrico Fermi asked, "Where are they." This is referred to today as the Fermi paradox, but there is no paradox. They are peering through their telescopes, calculating the incredible difficulty of traveling to another star, and deciding to let others, somewhere else, make the effort. That's what I would do.
REVIEWS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 48, RG4001, 53 PP., 2010
SOLAR INFLUENCES ON CLIMATE
L. J. Gray, et al.
In a CNN interview, Rand Paul, the newly elected Senator for Kentucky, defends extending the Bush tax cuts by saying that "we all work for rich people or sell stuff to rich people."
Several key Republican Congressmen — most notably Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who could take over the chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — have said they plan to investigate climate scientists they contend manipulated data to prove the case that human activity is contributing to global warming. (LA Times)It doesn't seem to matter an iota that three (isn't it now?) investigations have cleared climate scientists of any wrongdoing with regard to the Climategate emails -- Republicans and other climate bullies seem determined to pound on this until blood appears. Yes, actual blood. What worries me is that someone might get seriously hurt, just like the Tides Foundation barely escaped violence due to Glenn Beck's inaccurate and relentless accusations.
WASHINGTON ROUNDTABLE ON SCIENCE & PUBLIC POLICY
Science Advice to Congress
by Michael Gough, Daniel S. Greenberg, and Richard E. Rowber
This is a transcript, and I can't fault Greenberg at all for appearing at a Marshall Institute event to offer his viewpoint. I'd easily have done the same.
It seems that Mann et al definitely misfired on this one.
Re: "Greenberg, Pielke Jr, Mann, Ehrlich and Rahmstorf":That's certainly very different than if Greenberg had accepted a writing assignment from the Marshall Institute, and so I was wrong to attribute any nefarious purposes to him, and I hereby apologize. As should Mann, Ehrlich, and Rahmstorf.
The answer is that Greenberg seems not to have written something for Marshall. They transcribed and published his comments from the round table discussion in which he participated.
“Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today.... sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.Personally, I think the Tea Partiers are actually concerned about stuff like this, but don't follow the details enough to even know it. So they rail against the obvious problems that get big media coverage, like the deficit, or taxes. But all they really know -- like you and I -- is that America isn't keeping up and is on the decline.
In pursuit of public support and government action, Pielke charges, mainstream researchers in the climate-change community have fudged the science, compromised the peer-review process and encouraged governments to pursue dubious remedies, while neglecting possibilities for averting climate-caused disasters. Unrealistic scenarios for reducing carbon emissions have been pushed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he argues, and the leaked e-mails from the notorious ‘Climategate’ episode have emboldened sceptics and diminished public confidence in scientific integrity.
Nature should have pointed out to its readers that Greenberg has served as a round-table speaker and written a report (see go.nature.com/otwvz2) for the Marshall nstitute (see go.nature.com/4u9ttd).
One of the most interesting factors in our American culture is the way we adults bewail the social crime of bullying in our schools while applauding it and laughing at it on a daily basis as we watch the bullies of Fox TV and other bully pulpit programs beat up on people who have something good, factual and educational to share.
This planned system of bullying, breaking into a person's response, ridiculing, telling lies about others, name-calling, harassing and making endless innuendoes about others is exactly the set of tactics used by individual and groups of bullies in our schools.Hmm.... ridiculing, lying, name-calling, harassing (such as publishing email addresses), endless innuendos.... Remind you of anybody?
