The Next Hurrah

Ten Years and Counting

By Mimikatz

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its fourth report (summary here), which synthesizes for policymakers attending the forthcoming UN conference in Bali  the three reports that it issued earlier this year as part of its Fourth Assessment Report.  Some of its conclusions are that

climate change is "unequivocal", that humankind's emissions of greenhouse gases are more than 90% likely to be the main cause, and that impacts can be reduced at reasonable cost.

But climate change may also bring about "abrupt and irreversible impacts" such as glacial melting and extinction of species.

"Approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5-2.5C (relative to the 1980-1999 average)," the summary concludes.

Other potential impacts highlighted in the text include:

• between 75m and 250m people are projected to have scarcer fresh water supplies than at present
• yields from rain-fed agriculture could be halved
• food security is likely to be further compromised in Africa
• there will be widespread impacts on coral reefs

One problem with the IPPC consensus process is that it takes a great deal of time, and thus it is not clear whether the newest report takes into account the accelerated arctic melting seen this year.  But it is clear that things are happening faster than anticipated, the BBC reports:

"If you look at the overall picture of impacts, both those occurring now and those projected for the future, they appear to be both larger and appearing earlier than we thought [in our 2001 report]," Martin Parry, co-chair of the impacts working group, told BBC News.

"Some of the changes that we previously projected for around 2020 or 2030 are occurring now, such as the Arctic melt and shifts in the locations of various species."

There are indications that projected increases in droughts are also happening earlier than expected, he said, though that was less certain.

Interestingly, the IPPC finds that absent human factors, the climate would have cooled over the last 50 years (due to volcanoes and solar changes); only models that simulate human effects produce warming over this period.  Warming is greatest in the northern polar regions and then in the north temperate and tropical zones (with the exception of the ocean area influenced by the jet stream).  It is least in the southern temperate zone and southern seas.  Human influences are "very likely" to have led to sea level increases.

The IPPC consensus now exhibits greater confidence in projections about droughts, heatwaves and floods, and their adverse consequences, plus stronger evidence of adverse impacts now on vulnerable ecosystems, such as polar and high-mountain regions and coral reefs. 

In the ffuture, as temperatures rise, Africa and Asia will be particularly hard hit, in part because they already face shortages of good water and areas of extreme drought.  Overall dry areas will become drier, low-lying areas will be wetter, smaller islands will be imperiled.  Arctic areas will be transformed.  Climate and weather will become more extreme.  The widely-held impression that North America will suffer the least seems to be somewhat true, although serious effects are anticipated in cities that already experience heat waves, as are water shortages in the West, significant variability in agricultural impacts, increased intensity of Atlantic hurricanes and stress on coastal areas generally.    

Projected changes are accelerating, and will persist for a millenium even if changes are made, raising the specter of whether, and how soon, we are facing irreversible changes or a "tipping point."  Most serious seems to be accelerating Arctic ice melting, as this could cause meters of sea level increases, beyond what the models anticipate.  The Jet Stream looks safe to the end of the century, despite some slowing, which will help moderate rising temperatures in Europe.  (In case you were wondering, Dubai's spectacular islands have been designed to withstand at least a half meter rise in sea level, which was the high end anticipated by the end of this century.  Some projections are now for three times that.) 

Dealing with climate change has costs, but so does failing to deal with climate change, given the near certainty of the trajectory of change.  The report concludes that

There is high agreement and much evidence that all stabilisation levels can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commercialised in coming decades, assuming appropriate and effective incentives are in place for their development, acquisition, deployment and diffusion and addressing related barriers.

But we need "substantial investment flows" and "effective technology transfer," meaning lots of money and getting the solutions to where they are needed.  The longer we wait, the harder it is, because we need to begin to reverse that nasty increasing trendline, and the longer we wait, not only is it getting steeper, but because of the persistence of greenhouse gases, the stabilization level, and the attendant changes (such as temperature and sea level increases), will be higher.  It looks from the chart like we have about ten years if we want things to stabilize at or near 2005 levels of greenhouse gases.  If the CO2 peak comes after the 2010-2030 period, the resulting world will look very different from what we have now.

Update:

Surprise, surprise.  The US representative tried to water the report down.   More of the Bush/Cheney regime's attempts to make policy by denying reality.  By contrast, the UN chief Ban Ki-moon calls for action.

"Catholics Hate Kerry...uh, Giuliani"; Repubs & Fundies to Divorce?

By DHinMI

Remember back in 2004 when the news media and the wingers were all atwitter about how John Kerry, because he supported a separation of church and state and upholding the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, was supposedly a rotten Roman Catholic and was under siege by the Roman Catholic Church?  Well, the stories were always wildly overblown, and usually ignored the important fact that the few Bishops who mouthed off about denying communion to Kerry were acting as free agents, because the American Bishops voted 183-6 against adopting an official policy of denying communion to politicians who supported abortion rights or any other social policies in conflict with the Church’s teachings.  As you should expect,  this fact was almost completely ignored by the press. 

The "priests will deny communion to pro-choice politicians" story has returned, but this time with a twist: it’s about a Republican, Rudy Giuliani:

Bush's base: hate the troops, or hate the commander?

By Kagro X

By now, you've all likely seen this Washington Post headline:

Shortages Threaten Guard's Capability 88 Percent of Units Rated 'Not Ready'

And it probably comes as no surprise to you. After all, it's practically become the secret Conventional Wisdom (if such a thing can possibly exist): George W. Bush is destroying America's Armed Forces.

And sure, we all knew this:

"We can't sustain the [National Guard and reserves] on the course we're on," said Arnold L. Punaro, chairman of the 13-member Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, established by Congress in 2005.

12/3 "Cold Case": Landmark gay television

I know this may not get a lot of comments, but I felt like I had to write something about this Sunday's episode of the CBS crime drama "Cold Case".

In recent years on TV, I've seen shows that tell me gay men are asexual and vapid, that lesbians exist as the butt of jokes unless they can find a man to turn them straight, that bisexuals and transgenders are incestuous and/or serial killers, that gay teenagers are only gay because they're bad people and because they want to infuriate their parents. I've even seen an FX show that made a hero out of a man who beat a gay man so badly that he had to be put into a medical coma.

What I haven't seen on most TV shows, especially network TV shows, is a simple, moving love story between gay men.

Until this Sunday.

PETA crosses the line

by emptypockets

Jan. 4 2007: For those just learning of this story, please also see today's update on it, detailing how PETA's lies just now crossed over to the mainstream media via the Sunday Times.

Charles Roselli, a biologist at Oregon Health & Science University, turned on his computer the other day to find that he had been targeted. His research had been lied about, and his reputation insulted. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise for a right-wing group to oppose his science, since his research implies that homosexuality is biologically programmed and part of the natural world, not a "lifestyle choice" or an "abomination." But it wasn't a right-wing group that had targeted him. It was PETA.

Dr. Roselli is part of a vanguard of researchers trying to understand the biological basis of complex behavior. Animal behavior is so complicated that it seems almost impossible that we could ever understand it at the molecular level -- but then again, that's what we thought about embryonic development a few decades ago, and that has turned out to be a beautiful and understandable molecular story. Likewise, complex behaviors are rapidly coming into range as something we can understand in our lifetime. For example, researchers have now assembled a fairly detailed picture of how circadian clocks keep time, synchronizing your body's internal rhythms to the pattern of day and night.

Understanding sexual behavior is one of the most exciting areas right now -- after all, the preference to mate with one individual over another is a major part of generating new species and therefore a driving force in evolution. Already some major advances have taken place. Catherine Dulac at Harvard University has found that mutating a single pheromone receptor in male mice makes them attempt to have sex with males that intrude on their territory, instead of trying to fight with them. It is absolutely stunning that changing a single gene -- even changing a single letter of the DNA code -- could have such tremendous and specific consequences on behavior.

Even more amazing, it turns out that in the fruit fly Drosophila there is a single gene that can confer both male and female sexual behavior. This gene can be read in either of two forms, much like if you and I were each quoting an article you might elide ("...") one paragraph while I might elide another, keeping the same key information but changing certain details. Similarly, this gene is read slightly differently in males than in females. Forcing males to express the female form of the gene makes them stop mating with females and instead become interested in other males; likewise, females expressing the male form of the gene begin performing the male part of the courtship ritual. If you had said fifteen years ago that sexual preference could be controlled by a single gene, I would have called you a nut.

But no one has been attacking the work of the fruit fly researchers. Catherine Dulac has not been called "anti-gay" by PETA. Instead, they picked on Dr. Roselli.

Global Warming Walk: Five Qs&As with Bill McKibben

By Meteor Blades

I sure wish I were in Vermont this week. I could join writer/environmentalist/deep thinker Bill McKibben and whoever else shows up for a four-day walk seeking to kindle federal action against global warming.

Billed as "The Road Less Traveled, Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future," the march will begin Thursday noon at Robert Frost's old writing cabin near Ripton, stop in cities along the way for Conversations on the Green, and end 43 miles up the road in Burlington. Knowing McKibben's work and the kind of people he attracts, I imagine those are going to be eye-opening conversations for participants and bystanders alike, a traveling teach-in, if you will. You can get a taste of this in my five-question interview with McKibben below.

Many, I know, downplay the value of a public demonstration, even public action of any kind outside the realm of lawsuits and legislation. Sooooo '60s, they say. Doesn't work anymore. If it ever really did. I couldn't disagree more. Perhaps the reason people say this comes from their being so comprehensively saturated with a megamedia caricature of the era. They don't believe most or any of what the megamedia tells them about the times they themselves live in, but they accept as gospel what's been told them regarding one of the periods of greatest social change since the Civil War.

The public intellectuals and other activists who spurred that change worked inside and outside the governing system, using whatever megaphone seemed proper at the moment to capture public attention and increase the pressure on public policy. What you mostly hear about that era today is the media-mediated version, a distorted fraction of the story. That's not my way of trying to sanctify the "protest" movements or say that we made no mistakes, no strategic blunders, or engaged in no counterproductive activism. Surely, we did more than enough of that and were paid for it with half-victories and outright defeats, some of them long-lasting. But, please, most of the focus, even most of the public events, had nothing to do grubby street demonstrations.

Speaking from experience, Billy boy?

By Meteor Blades

Selecting the contemptible, feeble, outrageous, inaccurate, intellectually destitute, villainous, morally upsidedown, false, stupid or depraved comments that emerge from the mouth of Bill O'Reilly on the Foxaganda label is a turkey shoot. Pick a date. Any date. Bullseye. Olbermann does it and Mike Stark does it and so do the folks at this site and this one.

For August 2, Billy boy managed to combine all those categories into one typical scurrilous comment, condescendingly delivered in his faux homespun imitation of Lonesome Rhodes. I had missed the broadcast, but it was captured by those fine deconstructors over at Media Matters:

The Wrong Answer

by emptypockets

A little over a month ago, I wrote that the New York State Court of Appeals was asking The Wrong Question about same-sex marriage. During arguments, they focused on whether children of opposite-sex parents turn out better than children of same-sex parents. That question, I said, was wrong because it judges individuals based on the class to which they belong. It is not different than asking if children of Christian parents turn out better than children of Jewish ones, or children of Democrats turn out better than children of Republicans. Not surprisingly, having asked the wrong question, this week the Court of Appeals arrived at the wrong answer.

They concluded that "there are rational grounds on which the Legislature could choose to restrict marriage to couples of opposite sex" (PDF), citing in particular the notion that children of opposite-sex parents turn out better. Confusingly, the justices go on to describe these "rational grounds" in terms of mystic sensations, anecdotes, and unsubstantiated dogma:

"Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like...

Legislature could rationally proceed on the common-sense premise that children will do best with a mother and father in the home."

Intuition, experience, and common sense are dark-age surrogates for reason. Yet the court rejects social scientific studies because they have been "limited" and "do not establish beyond doubt that children fare equally well in same-sex and opposite-sex households." Why the state is not asked to show "beyond doubt" that opposite-sex parents are better, I don't know. In the absence of compelling evidence, I always take what evidence is available. The court rejects inconvenient facts and yields to intuition and dogma.

The Wrong Question

by emptypockets

New York's Court of Appeals -- the state's highest court -- heard arguments Wednesday in a gay marriage case that pools several suits, including one against the New York City official who issues marriage licenses. That case had previously been decided in favor of same-sex marriage, but was appealed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supposedly supports same-sex marriage but wanted to appeal the favorable ruling to the highest court to clarify the decision. (He must feel he has friends in high places -- they also have granted him permission to unilaterally decide to ignore laws giving domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples.) Thanks, Mike.

In the coverage of the current hearing, something stood out to me -- something that couldn't help but bring to mind the words of the great courtroom orator Fielding Mellish, "I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham." Specifically:

During the two and a half hours of oral argument, the judges on the Court of Appeals grappled with essential questions of social values, asking tough questions without tipping their hands as to their ultimate decision.

They wanted to know whether there were studies showing that children raised by mothers and fathers turned out better than those raised by same-sex couples, and they wanted to know whether opening the door to gay marriage would also open the door to bigamy or polygamy.

Let's put aside for the moment the fact that this is a question for an AM talk show, not for the highest court in the state. Let's dismiss, for now, the fact that the argument that marriage is only for the purpose of raising children is on its face absurd. And let's forget, temporarily, that the studies to which we're referring have been thoroughly discredited as far as I know.

Let's just pass by all of that right now and imagine it were true -- imagine that children raised by same-sex couples actually were, on average, somehow less well-adjusted. Is that seriously a path this court would want to go down? Are you telling me this court is ready to start withholding rights from individuals based on the average behavior of the class to which they belong?

Because I'm wondering how the studies will read, that look at whether children raised by Christian parents "turned out better" than the ones raised by Jewish parents. I'm wondering how the studies will read, that look at whether children raised by Democratic parents "turned out better" than the ones raised by Republicans. I'm wondering who else the court would be ready to declare unfit for marriage.

In particular, I'm looking forward to the study that examines how children "turn out" who are raised by married straight bigoted homophobes.

Chernobyl, beyond the numbers

by Plutonium Page

"It was like airplane pilots experimenting with the engines in flight..."
             -- Valeri Legaslov, Soviet Chernobyl accident investigator

"Without Father"
              -- a 1986 painting about the Chernobyl disaster, by Lyudmila Koulichenko, age 12

"We did not yet possess a system of imagination, analogies, words or experiences for the catastrophe of Chernobyl."
                --  Svetlana Alexiyevich, writer from Belarus

On 26 April, 1986, the worst commercial nuclear accident in history occurred during a test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which lies near the Belarus-Ukraine border, 100 km north of Kiev, Ukraine.  At 1:23:58 am local time, the plant's Unit 4 reactor was rocked by a steam explosion, followed by a hydrogen explosion and a fire resulting in temperatures over 2,000°C.  The 1,000 ton reactor lid was blown off the core, the nuclear fuel rods melted, and more than 100 times the radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined was released into the atmosphere over the 10 days that the fire burned.

Many of the small towns and villages close to Chernobyl were rendered uninhabitable, and radioactive fallout from the accident was detected all over Europe.  On that day, the lives of over 130,000 people evacuees from the 30 km radius "exclusion zone" (left, click to enlarge) were changed in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to imagine.

Most of the recent media discussion of the Chernobyl catastrophe has focused on the controversy about the number of people who have died - and will die - as a result of the accident.  In other words, the media has largely failed to see the people behind the statistics.  The purpose of this post is not to discuss the numbers, but to put a human face on the legacy of that day in April 1986.

This post is dedicated to those who died, and those who are still with us today. 

(A note to the nerds out there:  for brevity, I am not going into extreme technical detail about the disaster.  However, if you're interested, this article [pdf] is excellent.)