This month, over a period of nine days, one million square kilometers of Arctic sea ice melted. Sea ice extent dropped below five million square kilometers at the earliest date ever.
Also this month, surface thawing on the Greenland ice cap grew from 40% to 97% of the ice cap area over a period of four days. A NASA scientist first thought the instruments were in error.
Update (April 3, 2013): A study from the University of Wisconsin connects the unusual melt to low level clouds.
Update (March 7, 2015):Greenland is the warmest its been in 100,000 years.
Update (January 6, 2016): A study in Nature Climate Change finds that a type of snow called "firn" that usually stores melting water is now losing its ability to hold more water. That means more melting water running into the ocean.
Update (January 13, 2016): A study in Nature Communications finds that cloud cover over Greenland traps heat and helps increase the outflow of meltwater. It's amazing we keep finding new ways for climate change to get worse.
Update (April 15, 2016): Greenland is experiencing record breaking melting for this time of year. Greater than ten percent of the ice sheet is melting more than a month earlier than usual.
Update (June 16, 2016): The capital of Greenland set a record for June with a high of 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature anomalies for April were far above even the recently established "normal" of 2001 to 2010.
Update (May 31, 2017): "Solitary waves" observed during the melt seasons of 2010 and 2012 seem to have caused increased ice flow. Rink Glacier saw a 61 percent increase in ice flow in 2012.
Update (July 30, 2017): Summer snow might mean no net loss on the Greenland ice sheet for the first time in 20 years.
It's important to remember that banks aren't here to serve you, they exist to make money. And one way to make money is to offer low income customers products such as prepaid debit cards or payday loans with high fees and interest charges. With poverty at the highest rate since 1965, I imagine the banks stand to make a bundle. Who needs the middle class when you can profit so much from the poor?
Three fourths of Americans aged 50 to 64 face bleak futures with a mean savings of $26,395 for retirement. A general rule of thumb is that you need 20 times your income in savings to maintain your standard of living in retirement. 401(k) plans have been a failure.
Update (February 18, 2013): Michael Fletcher reports on a Center for Retirement Research study that estimates 53 percent of Americans age 30 and above are at risk of being unprepared for retirement. In 2001, only 38 percent were at risk.
Update (June 22, 2013): The National Institute on Retirement Security released a report indicating that the crisis is worse than previously portrayed with the "typical" working age household having only about $3000 in retirement savings.
Update (July 16, 2013): A report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute suggests that under certain circumstances a 401(k) plan provides more retirement income than traditional private sector pension plans. The study is a survey of workers who may or may not be contributing to a 401(k) they are eligible for. But those who seem to do the best are those who pay in for 30 to 40 years and those with higher incomes.
Update (September 3, 2013): The Economic Policy Institute charts retirement savings trends and concludes that 401(k) plans have created a few big winners and many losers. Percentiles below 50 are not shown because half of workers have no retirement savings.
Update (September 6, 2013): A report from the IRS shows that fewer workers are saving money in retirement accounts and the amount saved is also decreasing. Two-thirds of workers saved nothing (seven-eighths among those in their twenties).
Update (September 24, 2013): Lynn Stuart Parramore reports on the EPI's Retirement Inequality Chartbook referred to above.
Update (October 2, 2013): HR 2374 is supported by the financial industry to replace "fiduciary" standards with "suitability" standards for consulting advice.
Update (October 31, 2013): In response the the 401(k) disaster, blogger Duncan Black (Atrios) pushes to expand Social Security.
Update (November 19, 2013): The anti-pension movement is not popular.
Update (November 22, 2013): Paul Krugman also supports expanding Social Security to address the retirement crisis.
Update (December 15, 2013): Michael Lind, co-author of the April New America Foundation report arguing to expand Social Security, claims that the discussion has shifted from "how much to cut" to "whether to cut or expand" Social Security thanks to people like Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Update (January 7, 2014): Paul Buchheit explains four ways in which American retirement is worse off than it needs to be.
1. Federal Tax Avoidance is the Biggest Threat to Social Security 2. State Tax Avoidance Defunds Pensions 3. Corporations Play One Underfunded State Against Another 4. Banks Take a Big Chunk of Our Retirement Accounts
Update (January 10, 2014): Steve Rosenfeld reports on the need to expand Social Security.
Update (March 3, 2014):More from Paul Buchheit about the retirement crisis.
Update (March 18, 2014): An Employee Benefit Research Institute survey reports confidence in having enough money for retirement is up, but only among those with higher incomes. The grim news is that over one-third of workers have saved $1000 or less for retirement.
Update (April 13, 2014): Josh Boak and Paul Wiseman explain how the fees on 401(k) accounts reduce savings by significant amounts. You might need to work an extra three years to compensate.
Update (May 7, 2014): With home values down, more people are taking early withdrawals from their 401(k) plans when they need extra cash. The median savings are now $24,400 overall and $65,300 for those age 55 or above. The early withdrawals will likely make the retirement crisis even worse.
Update (May 10, 2014): An excerpt from James Russell's book Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis.
Update (August 12, 2014): A Federal Reserve survey reports that 31 percent of Americans have no retirement savings. That includes 19 percent of those age 55 to 64.
Update (September 13, 2014): The retirement crisis and the student loan crisis are starting to converge for a few people according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office study.
Update (November 7, 2014): A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that the wealth of the middle quintile of those age 55 to 64 has been declining since 2004.
Update (February 27, 2015): Pensions get more expensive as retirees live longer than expected.
Update (June 5, 2015): An analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds that 52 percent of households age 55 and older have no retirement savings. A good reason to expand Social Security.
Update (October 29, 2015): A report from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government gives a stark contrast. The top 100 CEOs have as much retirement savings as the bottom 41 percent of Americans. That's about $50,000,000 per CEO and about $100 per family.
Update (March 5, 2016): A report from the Economic Policy Institute explains how retirement inequality has grown as 401(k)s have replaced pensions.
For many groups—lower-income, black, Hispanic, non-college-educated, and unmarried Americans—the typical working-age family or individual has no savings at all in retirement accounts, and for those that do have savings, the median balances in retirement accounts are very low.
Update (April 10, 2016): Transamerica has an annual retirement survey. Retirement savings by age group:
People in their 20s have a median retirement savings of $16,000.
For people in their 30s it's $45,000.
For people in their 40s it's $63,000.
For people in their 50s it's $117,000.
For people in their 60s it's $172,000.
Update (May 11, 2016): A U.S. Government Accountability Office report finds that the prevalence of 401(k) plans (defined contribution or DC) contributes to greater inequality.
Update (March 18, 2018): Keith Spencer talks to younger adults who are deliberately not saving for retirement because they don't see much of a future for capitalism.
Many millennials expressed to me their interest in creating self-sustaining communities as their only hope for survival in old age; a lack of faith that capitalism as we know it would exist by retirement age; and that alternating climate crises, concentrations of wealth, and privatization of social welfare programs would doom their chance at survival.
Update (January 30, 2019): Representative John Larson has a plan to expand Social Security. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans want to eliminate the estate tax. Priorities.
Update (June 15, 2019): Retirement savings gaps around the world will leave many people outliving their plans.
The Congressional Research Service released a report on the distribution of wealth in the United States. One of the most glaring statistics is the fact that the poorer half of American households have just 1.1% of the country's wealth. The report indicates that share had generally been around 3% until the recent financial crisis. Meanwhile, the top one tenth of households have 74.5% of the wealth.
Another way to see the skewed distribution is by comparing the mean amount of wealth to the median level of wealth. If everyone were given an equal share (the mean), each household would have $498,800. But the dividing point between the poorer half and richer half (the median) is $77,380. The mean is that much larger because relatively few very rich people skew the calculation. And the ratio between the mean and median is the highest in the 21 years covered by the report.
Bill McKibben explains a concise way to understand the climate crisis using three numbers:
2 degrees Celsius is the maximum amount of warming that most countries have agreed is necessary to prevent catastrophic change. Since 0.8 degrees of warming have already happened and another 0.8 degrees are on the way with current carbon dioxide emissions, there's not much room to work with. And there are climate scientists who think a 2 degree limit won't save us.
565 gigatons is the estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide that can be released by 2050 and stay within the 2 degree limit. Unfortunately, emissions have been increasing by about three percent per year and we would use up our carbon "budget" in about sixteen years.
2795 gigatons is the estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide that would be released from burning all the existing fossil fuel reserves. This is far beyond the carbon budget even as the search is made for more fossil fuel supplies.
McKibben tries to remain optimistic and suggests that a moral case can be made against the energy corporations. They are the enemy needed to energize the environmental movement. But those fossil fuel reserves are worth $27 trillion. And it's this fourth number that explains all you need to know about our fate.
Update (July 30): Nicholas Arguimbau has a response to McKibben.
Update (December 27): Rebecca Solnit declares 2013 to be Year Zero in the battle against climate change.
Update (October 28, 2013): A study from the University of Oxford estimates that the carbon budget would be exceeded in about 27 years.
Update (December 23, 2013): Sean McElwee and Lew Daly explain the carbon bubble. If world governments do adhere to a carbon budget, carbon assets face a $20 trillion devaluation.
Update (December 6, 2014): A reminder that the world has already used 65 percent of our carbon budget.
Update (September 16, 2015): Burning through all the world's fossil fuels would melt of the ice on Earth and bring a sea level rise of 200 feet. But disaster would occur well before that happens.
Alone in the Universe is John Gribbin's argument for why ours is the only technological civilization in the universe (well, galaxy anyway). The book is more or less an expansion on the famous Drake equation which has been used to estimate the number of civilizations in the galaxy. Estimates have historically ranged from a few hundred to several million.
Gribbin goes into great detail with a lot of science about galaxy and planet formation, the history of the earth and the evolution of life. I had been aware of habitable zones around stars due to the need for liquid water for life to develop, but I hadn't realized that galaxies also have those zones--regions where sufficient amounts of metals exist due to previous generations of stars fusing the heavier elements before the stars exploded.
The details build up--each one slicing away at the likelihood of us being here: earth-like planets are rare, it's unusual for stars to form singly, our moon is unusually large compared to the planet, the tilt of the earth was from the collision that formed the moon, the moon stabilizes the earth's rotation, the tilt gives us seasons, our large metal core gives us a magnetic field, the thinness of the crust gives us plate tectonics, climate changes prompted and accelerated the evolution of our species. The extent of uniqueness is staggering.
And if all that isn't enough, Gribbin ends with a discovery from about two and a half years ago I hadn't been aware of--an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is on a collision course with the solar system. Sure, it will take about 1.4 million years and will likely pass through the outer regions of the solar system (Oort Cloud). But it turns out that the sun typically has a "close" approach with another star about every two million years. And the Oort Cloud is where comets come from. If Gliese 710 also has its own cluster of comets, the near pass could send a bombardment of objects toward the earth. Large impacts have caused mass extinctions before; future impacts could destroy civilization (if any then still exist) or even destroy all of life.
It's strange to consider how contingent our presence is on being at the right place at the right time. I can't help but believe that simple life exists in many places. Of course, we don't know for sure. To be truly alone flies in the face of a lot of science fiction. Our human history is full of great achievement but also great disappointment--surely this can't be all the universe (or galaxy) has to offer?
Climate change split our ancestors into two groups--one stayed in the trees and one learned to live on the grasslands. Gribbin mentions that all humans on earth are descended from a group of only one thousand individuals. Is the intelligence we ascribe to ourselves merely a freak occurrence, a lethal mutation? Anthropogenic climate change tests the limits of that intelligence. We have the technology, but not the political smarts to solve the problem. Obviously, Gliese 710 is the least of our concerns. Perhaps we would have been better off staying in the trees.
Update (January 7, 2013): Perhaps Earth-like planets are not so rare, but most orbit stars much different from ours.
Update (July 30, 2013): A study from the University of Victoria finds that the habitable zones around stars are narrower than previously assumed.
Update (November 4, 2013): Based on a survey of 42,000 stars by the Kepler Space Telescope, there may be as many as 4.4 billion Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Still unknown is the probability of any planet for supporting life. MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager points out that "Earth-sized" doesn't mean "Earth-like". And Washington Post commenter 'wolfeja' lists several other factors relevant to life on Earth such as a molten iron core, gas giants in the solar system, a moon, active tectonic plates, chemical composition, and an axis tilt. The same sort of factors discussed by Gribbin.
Update (April 4, 2014): The Cassini spacecraft has confirmed the presence of liquid water between the rocky core and the surface ice of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Update (August 20, 2014): A complete ecosystem of microbes is discovered under the Antarctic ice sheet.
Update (August 27, 2014): Caleb Scharf, author of The Copernicus Complex, points out that just because an improbable series of events lead to humans on Earth doesn't mean there aren't other paths that could lead to similar outcomes on other planets.
Update (January 5, 2015): A study by Coryn Bailer-Jones of The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy identifies a second dwarf star called Hip 86505 that could reach the edge of the solar system within one-quarter to half million years.
Update (March 18, 2015): A study projects that billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy have one to three planets in their habitable zones.
Update (April 25, 2015): A survey of 100,000 nearby galaxies lead by The Pennsylvania State University concluded that there were no signs of advanced civilizations. At least according to our assumptions about how advanced civilizations would collect energy.
Update (July 23, 2015): NASA announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet so far. Kepler-452b is 1400 light-years away, is 60 percent larger is diameter, and orbits a similar star to our Sun within that star's habitable zone.
Update (October 23, 2015): Is it possible that most potentially Earth-like planets haven't been formed yet?
Update (January 22, 2016): A paper by Aditya Chopra and Charley Lineweaver from the Australian National University hypothesizes that life on most planets goes extinct very quickly. Early life forms need to evolve fast enough to be able to regulate the planet's temperature. Lineweaver:
The mystery of why we haven’t yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces.
Update (May 1, 2016): A paper by Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modifies the Drake equation and places a lower bound on the probability that humans are unique in the Universe. They argue that other technological civilizations are likely to have evolved before us, but are also probably extinct.
Update (August 2, 2016): Low mass stars are much more common and a hypothesis suggests that if they can support life, it may be too early for sentient organisms to have evolved.
Update (July 16, 2017): If there were no earthquakes, life would not be possible. Earthquakes are caused by circulating magma. The iron in moving magma generates a magnetic field. The magnetic field protects the atmosphere from being blown away by solar wind. Atmospheric pressure prevents the oceans from boiling away. Also, fault lines where earthquakes occur are areas where resources are brought to the surface. Mineral rich soil and water made civilization possible.
Update (February 18, 2019): Joe Scott discusses the Rare Earth Hypothesis.
Update (October 14, 2019): In an interview with Keith Spencer, Erik Asphaug discusses the possibility that life on Earth would not exist without the moon.
Update (December 23, 2020): A radio signal from Proxima Centauri was detected in the spring of 2019.
The researchers studying the wave emission have not yet been able to identify any Earthly origin, whether a satellite in orbit or something on the ground. As a result, scientists at the Breakthrough Listen project — an organization based at the University of California, Berkeley that searches for radio signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life forms in the universe — believe that the radio signal could originate from extraterrestrial intelligent life.
Andrew Leonard writes about three reports that document growing inequality in the US. While income has grown for all classes, wealth has not. Mobility displays a phenomenon called "stickiness at the ends". Those raised at the bottom or the top tend to remain there as adults.
Update (January 13, 2013): Lynn Stuart Parramore reflects on the British class system as portrayed in the documentary "56 Up" (and the rest of the "Up" series). While many Americans continue to believe in the Dream, the fact is that the United States is among the lowest for mobility for developed countries.
Update (July 22, 2013): A study out of Harvard University and the University of California Berkeley shows how mobility variesgeographically in the United States.
Another post includes a map from the New York Times which has further explanation.
Update (July 26, 2013): More about the mobility study above: a look at race and "economic segregation", and a discussion on downward mobility for middle-class children.
Update (July 29, 2013): Paul Krugman writes about about the impact of urban sprawl on mobility.
Update (March 10, 2014): Denver writer Lisa Wirthman gives a Colorado perspective on inequality.
Update (March 8, 2015): Sean McElwee examines the evidence for a lack of social mobility in the United States. The vast majority of people face, often brief, periods of economic insecurity.
In the Pacific Northwest, it's our turn to suffer through 100+ temperatures much of the rest of the country has already experienced. And NOAA has released a report indicating that the US has just gone through the hottest 12 months and hottest half year on record.
Americans want a more equitable distribution of wealth even as they underestimate the extent of inequality:
The Center for Popular Economics has a booklet (also free pdf) produced as a resource for the Occupy movement. It provides an analysis of the economy from a socialist point of view.
Update (March 3, 2013): View a related video at this post.
Update (November 27, 2014): In a paper for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Barry Cynamon and Steven Fazzari argue that the bottom 95 percent have lost income share since 1980 and used debt to maintain consumption. When borrowing got tighter in the Great Recession, demand dropped and has lead to a sluggish recovery.
