Via the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition’s website, there will be a discussion of the proposed MA Carbon Tax and its potential impact on consumers on Monday, October 6, at 7:30 PM at the Cary Memorial Library in Lexington. State Sen. Mike Barrett, one of the bill’s sponsors, will participate.
Weekly Digest – September 28, 2014
Prof. Mario Molina, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for elucidating the threat that refrigerant gases (chlorofluorocarbons) pose to the ozone layer, uses the image above to convey the state of understanding of human-driven climate change. Prof. Molina:
There appears to be a gross misunderstanding of the nature of climate change science among those that have attempted to discredit it. They convey the idea that the science in question behaves like a house of cards: if you remove just one of them, the whole structure falls apart. However, this is certainly not the way the science of complex systems has evolved. A much better analogy is a jigsaw puzzle: many pieces are missing, and some might even be in the wrong place, but there is little doubt that the overall image is clear, namely that climate change is a serious threat that needs to be urgently addressed. It is also clear that modest amounts of warming will have both positive and negative impacts, but above about 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit most impacts turn negative for many ecological systems, and for most nations.
Must Read
- Andrew Revkin, Certainties, Uncertainties and Choices with Global Warming
- Ethan Gilsdorf, Look Up! Small Screens, Big Distractions And The Lost Art Of Knowing Your Place
Should Read/Watch
- Massachusetts State Legislature, Bill H.532: An Act relative to shifting from carbon emissions to transportation investment
- Dean Baker, Rising Dollar Costs Jobs
- Carl Hulse, First Draft Video: [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren on Fixing Washington
Environment
- Joe Romm, The Wall Street Journal Publishes Long-Debunked Myths To Promote Climate Inaction
- Rabett Run, We don’t know everything, but we know enough!
- Katie Valentine, Denying Climate Change ‘Will Cost Us Billions Of Dollars,’ U.S. Budget Director Warns
- Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax
- Brad Plumer, 7 charts that help make sense of this week’s UN climate talks
- Brad Plumer, Past UN climate talks have failed. Will this next round be any different?
- Justin Gillis, Testing Future Conditions for the Food Chain
- Save the North 40 Wellesley
Donald Berwick on Single-Payer Health Care
No, I didn’t vote for Berwick in the primary but he is spot on about making health care more affordable. From an interview he did with Carey Goldberg:
I asked Dr. Berwick about the reaction to his single-payer position in his many campaign-season travels, and he said the biggest surprise was how positive the response had been from voters who would likely not call themselves progressives. They either already agreed with the idea, he said, or responded instantly after one sentence of explanation with, “That sounds right to me. Let me tell you my story.”
“I remember a carpenter in Hingham,” he said. “I don’t think he would have said he was a progressive — he was a somewhat older carpenter struggling to make ends meet, sitting on a sofa at a gathering, a meet-and-greet, and I started talking about this, and I guess — embarrassingly, to me — I was expecting some pushback. But he immediately said, ‘I’ve got to tell you a story.’ And he told me about his struggle to get health insurance.
“He very carefully went through the policy options, he had picked one that had a maximum deductible that was pretty stiff, and he was ready to swallow it. And he did, he signed up for that plan. And then, the problem was that he had three major illnesses the following year. And he discovered — to his dismay — that the deductible did not apply to the year, it applied to each separate episode. So this guy, who’s working with his hands and trying to just get through and have his family’s ends meet, suddenly found himself tens of thousands of dollars in debt, because of the complexity [of health insurance.] And he said, ‘Enough of this!’ He immediately understood and was fully on board, and that kind of experience has been pretty constant for me.”
Overall, Dr. Berwick said, “The response has been extremely positive beyond anything I would have anticipated. When I took the position, I had no polling information. I did it because I was looking at the state budget and seeing the erosive impact of rising health care costs on everything else we need to do. The numbers were stunning to me. I got briefed by the Mass. Budget Policy Center and they said — as I remember the numbers and have been quoting them — Parks and Recreation were down 25 percent, local aid was down 40 percent, higher education was down 30 percent.
Music for Friday night
NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory
I happened across NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory: Physical Science Division’s web site today. Looks to have quite a bit of interesting content. Among other things, their Research Highlights section includes pages on Interpreting Climate Conditions, Atmospheric Rivers [1], Improving Hurricane Intensity Forecasts, and Twentieth Century Reanalysis [2].
Notes:
- Atmospheric rivers (AR) are “relatively narrow regions in the atmosphere that are responsible for most of the horizontal transport of water vapor outside of the tropics… On average, about 30-50% of annual precipitation in the west coast states occurs in just a few AR events, thus contributing to water supply… A strong AR transports an amount of water vapor roughly equivalent to 7.5–15 times the average flow of liquid water at the mouth of the Mississippi River.”
- “Using a state-of-the-art data assimilation system and surface pressure observations, the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is generating a six-hourly, four-dimensional global atmospheric dataset spanning 1871 to 2012 to place current atmospheric circulation patterns into a historical perspective.”
Thought for the Day: 26 September 2014
My daughter is doing a mashup of Let it Go and the Mighty Machines theme song. It’s spectacular.
Holder Out, Bharara In
Okay, “Bharara in.” is wishful thinking on my part but Mr. Holder is out as AG. Will anyone miss him? Hoisted from the Comments section of the NY Times’ piece on his departure, “Attorney General Eric Holder, Prominent Liberal Voice in Obama Administration, Is Resigning“… (The Times characterization of Holder as a prominent liberal is… interesting. It begs the question, what exactly qualifies one as a liberal these days anyway? But I digress.)
Glassyeyed from Indiana:
Real liberals would put banksters in jail.
You don’t say. Here’s Michael from Tampa: Continue reading
Music for Thursday night
Thought for the Day: 23 September 2014
The Nobel Committee called. They want their Peace Prize back. (Could they do that?) Looking at his list of actions which seem a little short of Peace-Prize-worthy, it’s getting kind of long.
Clarification: I don’t mean to imply that Pres. Obama’s actions aren’t justifiable or that I agree or disagree with them, just that they seem to run contradictory to the intent of the Peace Prize:
With regard to the Peace Prize, [Alfred Nobel’s] will stipulated that it was to be awarded to the person “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”
There is no Nobel Realpolitik Prize.
Weekly Digest – September 21, 2014
Must Read
- Josh Marshall, “Homeland” And Other Un-American Words and Ideas
- Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Bracken Hendricks, Green Growth [Ed.: Thanks to Brad DeLong for noting this on his blog.]
- Emily Atkin, Watch Obama’s Top Science Advisor Repeatedly Shut Down Climate Deniers At House Climate Hearing
Should Read
- Brad DeLong, Reformicons Agonistes [Ed.: Read the comments as well as the main post]
- Adam Vaccaro, So Long to Paul Guzzi, Who Helped Kill Noncompete Reform [Ed.: More on non-compete agreements in MA here]
- Nature News & Comment, China goes back to basics on research funding
- American Institute of Physics, Administration request for FY 2015 science budgets
Environment and Climate Change
- Ari Phillips, The Dangerous Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing, And It’s Because Of A Global Agreement
- Bill Chameides, U.S. Acid Rain Regulations: Did They Work? [Ed.: Spoiler alert! They did!]
- RealClimate, The most common fallacy in discussing extreme weather events
- Joe Romm, This Changes Everything: Naomi Klein Is Right, Unchecked Capitalism Will Destroy Civilization
- Joshua Holland, Naomi Klein: Pitting Environment Against Economy Risks Failure of Both
- Mark Bittman, Let’s Reject the ‘Inevitable’
- Paul Krugman, Could Fighting Global Warming Be Cheap and Free?