Marine Ice-cliff Instability

Eric Holthaus describes research aimed at understanding how quickly sea levels could rise.

The glaciers [Pine Island and Thwaites] are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet.

A wholesale collapse of Pine Island and Thwaites would set off a catastrophe. Giant icebergs would stream away from Antarctica like a parade of frozen soldiers. All over the world, high tides would creep higher, slowly burying every shoreline on the planet, flooding coastal cities and creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years — much too quickly for humanity to adapt.

Update (June 10, 2018):  Peter Clark discusses updates to the IPCC projections on sea level rise.

Update (February 4, 2019):  Robert Hunziker cites a study with a surprising discovery in Antarctica.

The new NASA study, utilizing IceBridge, shows a surprising loss of 14B tons of ice in only three years from the Thwaites Glacier, where a humongous hole lurks beneath the glacier’s icy/snowy surface, a massive cavity nearly the size of NYC but hidden within the core of the ice sheet.

Update (February 22, 2019):  Robert Hunziker has bad news from Antarctica.

According to NASA: "East Antarctica has the potential to reshape coastlines around the world through sea level rise, but scientists have long considered it more stable than its neighbor, West Antarctica. Now, new detailed NASA maps of ice velocity and elevation show that a group of glaciers spanning one-eighth of East Antarctica’s coast have begun to lose ice over the past decade, hinting at widespread changes in the ocean."

Update (January 28, 2020):  Robert Hunziker follows up on the news about Thwaites.

Update (February 5, 2020):  The faster than expected melting of Thwaites Glacier will eventually produce a 10 foot sea level rise by itself.

Big Tech

Deborah James warns that the major technology companies are seeking favorable rules in World Trade Organization negotiations.

[T]he rules they are seeking go far beyond what most of us think of as “e-commerce.” Their top agenda is to ensure free ― for them ― access to the world’s most valuable resource ― the new oil, which is data. They want to be able to capture the billions of data points that we as digitally-connected humans produce on a daily basis, transfer the data wherever they want, and store them on servers in the United States. This would endanger privacy and data protections around the world, given the lack of legal protections on data in the US.

Then they can process data into intelligence, which can be packaged and sold to third parties for large profits, akin to monopoly rents. It is also the raw material for artificial intelligence, which is based on the massive accumulation of data in order to “train” algorithms to make decisions. In the economy of the future, whoever owns the data will dominate the market. These companies are already being widely criticized for their monopolistic and oligopolistic behaviors, which would be consolidated under these proposals.

Underreported War Deaths

A New York Times investigation finds that civilian deaths from airstrikes in Iraq are underreported by a factor of 31.

Since the U.S.-war against ISIS began in August 2014, the coalition has released monthly reports in which it claims tens of thousands of ISIS combatants and 466 civilians have been killed in Iraq. While the coalition claims civilians have died in only 89 of its more than 14,000 airstrikes in Iraq, Khan and Gopal's on-the-ground reporting suggests the civilian death toll from coalition bombings in well into the thousands. U.K.-based Airwars estimates at least 3,000 civilians have been killed.

Special Election

It will be interesting to see if more results like this come along in reaction to the current political climate.

Democrat Allison Ikley-Freeman defeated Republican Brian O’Hara in Tuesday’s special election for a state Senate seat representing parts of Tulsa.

The 26-year-old said Oklahoma’s continuing state budget problems were a big concern of voters she spoke with during the campaign.

“Everyone I was engaging with depends in some way or another on basic needs that are provided through the state budget,” Ikley-Freeman said. “People started to feel scared.”

Update (December 6):  DSA member Ross Grooters was elected to the city council in Pleasant Hill, Iowa.

I realized politically minding my own business and having political apathy was not going to make my life better.

Whether you are on the left or the right of the political spectrum, everybody is facing the same economic hardships.

Update (December 19):  Control of the Virginia House of Delegates came down to a single vote in one race.

Update (December 23):  That vote total is now officially a tie--so it comes down to drawing a name out of bowl.

Update (January 4, 2018):  The Republican won the draw.

Update (January 17, 2018):  A heavily Republican state senate district in Wisconsin elected a Democrat with 55 percent of the vote.

Update (February 6, 2018):  Another flip in a deep red Missouri district. It was a 31 point swing from the 2016 election.

Update (February 21, 2018):  A legislative district in Kentucky that went 72 to 23 for Republicans in 2016 flipped 68 to 32 for a Democrat.

Update (March 15, 2018):  A Congressional district in Pennsylvania has likely flipped.

Update (April 4, 2018):  A Democrat won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court by a wide margin.

Update (April 24, 2018):  No win for the Democrat, but Republicans had to spend $1.2 million in a suburban Arizona Congressional district. And it was a 15 point swing for Democrats. But a Democrat did win a New York state assembly seat held by Republicans for 40 years.

Update (June 13, 2018):  Another Democratic upset in Wisconsin.

Update (August 7, 2018):  Are Fuckface supporters getting tired of his antics? The Republican barely squeaked by in a solid Ohio district.

No Big Bang?

Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das propose a new cosmological model.

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The Big Bang is typically described as a well established theory. But I just can't wrap my head around dark matter/dark energy--it seems too "made up". I'm in no position to judge, but the new idea somehow feels right.

Update (December 22, 2019):  I have no idea if this has anything to do with a big bang, but apparently two ways of determining the Hubble constant are producing two diverging values. It implies two greatly different age estimates for the universe and suggests a fundamental misunderstanding somewhere in the physics.

Second Notice

Over 15,000 scientists have signed on to an updated warning first issued 25 years ago.

Humanity is now being given a second notice, as illustrated by these alarming trends. We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats. By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.

Update (July 2, 2018):  Just came across a neat summary at Collapse of Industrial Civilization:

Like mindless bacteria bent on their own success, humans are victims of their own DNA and ingenuity.

Democracy Threatened

Alongside reports of Republican voters expressing no regrets over last year's vote, Gary Younge writes about his conversations around the country.

Increasingly, for many white Americans, their racial privilege resides not in positive benefits of work and security but in the sole fact that it could be worse – they could be black or Latino. In other words, their whiteness is all they have left.

Henry Giroux sees a nation that no longer values critical thought.

This assault on higher education is accompanied by a systemic culture of lies that has descended upon America. The notion that democracy can only function with an informed public is viewed with disdain. [Fuckface] apparently rejoices in his role as a serial liar, knowing that the public is easily seduced by exhortation, emotional outbursts and sensationalism.

The corruption of the truth, education and politics is abetted by the fact that Americans have become habituated to overstimulation, a culture of immediacy and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has the time to crystallize into mature and informed thought.

Meanwhile, Sascha Meinrath says our elections have been distorted by social and political forces.

These problems with America’s voting system did not materialize out of the blue, and certainly were not orchestrated by foreign powers. Rather, the election results were skewed by two longstanding, systematic, often racially motivated, well-resourced efforts: election district gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement.

Paul Blumenthal reminds us who pays for those elections.

The White House and congressional Republicans have sought to portray their tax plan as primarily a middle class tax cut. But lately, some of them have been admitting that big money political donors and wealthy CEOs, two groups that overlap heavily, are the ones who care about it the most.

[S]everal Republicans have indicated that the tax bill would boost the wealth of the already rich and ensure that their political donations keep flowing to help the GOP hold power in 2018.

And if all this isn't enough, Paul Rosenberg reports that Wisconsin just became the 28th state (out of 34 required) to call for a constitutional convention.

“Sadly, this is not fake news,” said Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn. “The specter of an Article V convention to rewrite the Constitution remains one of the most alarming threats to our democracy that nobody has ever heard of before. The deep-pocketed special interest groups behind this effort to call a convention are not likely to stop with a single amendment when there are no rules to prevent opening up the Constitution to a full rewrite in a runaway convention.”

Update (November 24):  Among other things, the Republican tax bill would effectively end the Johnson Amendment which prohibits tax-exempt organizations from endorsing political candidates.

To make it even worse, the tax-exempt status of churches and charities means that any millionaire or billionaire who funneled political spending through such a group could then turn around and claim that donation as a tax writeoff. Money given to a pastor in order to buy his endorsement wouldn't look any different on paper than money given to a church for its charitable work or other legitimate purposes. Republicans are creating a loophole that will allow rich people to shelter political donations from taxes while influencing election campaigns in total secrecy.

Update (December 25):  Junior uses an isolated incident of F.B.I. agents exchanging personal anti-von Clownstick texts to peddle conspiracy theory and imply that holding his father accountable amounts to treason.

My father talked about a rigged system throughout the campaign, and people were like, 'Oh, what are you talking about?' But it is. And you're seeing it.

There is, and there are, people at the highest levels of government that don't want to let America be America.

Update (December 30):  Cas Mudde sees the president as a symptom of an underlying danger.

[T]he Republican establishment had radicalised its base to such an extent that it was no longer representative of its views. [Von Clownstick] didn’t hijack the Republican party, he provided the base with a real representative again.

Update (February 26, 2018):  Cenk Uygur criticizes Common Cause and points out that a constitutional convention can only propose amendments, quoting Article V:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress.

The issue that Uygur is pushing is an amendment to get all money out of elections. And Lee Fang reports on how Chinese government owned Wanhua joined the American Chemistry Council which will allow the Chinese to pour dark money into U.S. elections. The influence of multinational corporations is much greater than anything Russia could do.

Update (July 9, 2018):  Steven Rosenfeld lists several trends with potential negative impacts on voting. And in an interview with Chauncey DeVega, Malcolm Nance warns that the Russians have a long term plan. He refers to them as "ultra-conservative Christian nationalists".

Their goal is to use democracy to destroy democracy. You want to get rid of democracy, have an election. But this is an election where they vote away your rights. This is an election where you lose to voter suppression and aid from a foreign power. But at the end of that loss, these enemies of real democracy then say, “Oh, no. It was all fair and square.” The Republicans want an autocracy where the rights of minorities and others are not protected. Vladimir Putin, with [Fuckface von Clownstick] and with the European conservative movements, are building an axis of autocracies, and the United States is on the relatively quick road to becoming an autocracy and no longer a constitutional republic.

I agree American democracy is under attack, it's just hard to resolve whether internal or external forces are the greatest threat.

Update (July 11, 2018):  Rosenfeld continues with additional threats to democracy.

There’s even more evidence that the absence of restraint, or of meaningful checks and balances, is a defining feature of our political time. There’s an authoritarian dominating the presidency’s bully pulpit. There are accountability-averse election rulings from the Supreme Court, where the right to segregate voters to fabricate popular vote majorities (gerrymandering) or to erode an opponent's base (partisan voter purges) was upheld.

Update (September 14, 2018):  Issue One finds that 75 percent of "dark money" is spent by just 15 organizations.

Update (September 18, 2018):  A court order is going into effect requiring dark money organizations to disclose large donors.

One Year

Sad!

Update:  Hopefully, a sign of things to come. Chris Cillizza's take on this year's election:

[Von Clownstick] remains a potent and powerful force in Republican primaries. But, he is a potentially toxic taint with the broader general electorate. Which puts Republicans—especially those facing potentially serious primary challenges or who sit in swing districts in the general election—in a no-win position. Run away from [Fuckface] and risk losing your primary fight. Run with [him] and risk losing the general election. Badly.

Update (November 26):  Few legislative accomplishments, but Jillian Ambroz explains how the Congressional Review Act is being used to undo progress.

Good News

An international agreement to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals is proving successful. The ozone hole above Antarctica has shrunk to its smallest extent since 1988.

The largest the hole became this year was about 7.6 million square miles wide, about two and a half times the size of the United States, in September. But it was still 1.3 million square miles smaller than last year, scientists said, and has shrunk more since September.

Update (February 9, 2018):  Well, unfortunately, global ozone is continuing to decline. A study by lead author William Ball with ETH Zurich finds that while total ozone declined 5 percent from 1970 to 1998, it has continued to decline another 0.5 percent since then.

Update (November 6, 2018):  A UN report finds the ozone layer is recovering at a rate of 1 to 3 percent per year since 2000.

Update (November 18, 2018):  The New York Times reports on evidence that rogue Chinese factories are still producing trichlorofluoromethane which is supposed to be phased out under the Montreal Protocol.

Failure of Education

It's felt like the election results represent the most massive failure of the educational system in history. We have a president who's "average analytic score was more than 3 standard deviations below that of the average Democrat or Republican from the last five election cycles, making him a clear outlier." But David Masciotra points to American voters as the biggest threat to democracy.

The documentation of Americans’ ignorance on fundamental issues of history and governance is by now so thorough that it hardly bears repeating. For example, only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government. These are people commonly referred to as “elitists.”

The problem is not just that Americans don’t know. It is that they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know how to figure it out. Like my students who attempt to meet their research requirement on Twitter, American voters are misinforming themselves with lies and inaccuracies from unreliable sources.

Bobby Azarian concludes:

As absurd as it sounds, now ignorance can apparently be considered a strength for a presidential candidate, as long as they can present it as being folksy.

It appears to indicate a thriving movement composed of individuals who are anti-intellectual and anti-science, and who want a president who is the same.

Update (November 5):  Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg urge humility and educated judgement for our leaders.

We can expect reasonable answers only from those who are deliberative and are repelled by dogma -- a characterization synonymous with the humanist tradition.

Update (February 19, 2018):  For the right wing, educational failure is when liberal arts classes turn someone into a activist.

Update (March 3, 2018):  Sophia McClennen explains why Americans are easy targets for fake news.

The real problem is that the United States is one of the least intelligent nations in the developed world. We aren’t good at processing and analyzing information, and that makes us suckers for bots, trolls and all other sorts of disinformation tactics.

Rigged Primary

Donna Brazile writes that the Democratic National Committee was bailed out by the Clinton campaign financially and was essentially run by the campaign throughout the Democratic presidential primary.

Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

... 

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

...

This victory fund agreement ... had been signed in August 2015.

This is bad. Von Clownstick is a fucking mess, but he'll be gone soon. And then the Republicans will keep control of Congress and Pence will be re-elected because the Democrats have nobody.

Update (November 4):  Peter Rosenstein calls Brazile a sellout.

Conor Lynch argues that it's time for Democrats to embrace the progressive wing of the party.

The popular appeal of progressives like Sanders and Warren is that they actually stand for something and understand the concerns of working Americans. If the Democrats want to win in 2018 and 2020, they will have to convince Americans that they share this quality. The only way to do this is to embrace the progressive wing that they conspired against in 2016.

Andrew O'Hehir thinks the problem is deeper than ideological factions.

Sanders-style progressives long to purge the old guard and build anew, rebranding the entire party as a social-democratic enterprise dedicated to single-payer health care, a $15 minimum wage and higher taxes on the rich. Clintonite moderates, meanwhile, maintain that the [von Clownstick] presidency, Republican hegemony in Washington and widespread social discord are rogue events that perhaps didn’t really happen and in any case do not reflect on their strategy of policy-wonk triangulation or their record of repeated and humiliating defeat.

Both responses are essentially utopian: They rest on the premise that the Democratic Party is still a functioning political organization and that the United States is still a functioning democracy. We ought to know better by now. It does no good to pretend that the Democratic (and democratic) crisis — which is not just ideological and political but also moral, philosophical, financial, institutional and other adjectives besides — does not exist or isn’t important.

[E]xplanations of what happened last November ,,, completely ignore the near-total meltdown of the two-party system that got us there in the first place. Hillary Clinton’s bizarre defeat-in-victory was an event so unlikely it seems like a metaphor. So does the fact that the Democratic Party was so broke and so cynical it literally sold its soul for rent money. But those things happened. Until we face them honestly there will be no Resistance, no victory, no political renewal and no democracy.

Update (November 5):  Former Clinton campaign staff criticize Brazile.

The open letter, signed by more than 100 people, including campaign chairman John Podesta and vice chair Huma Abedin, said that staffers “do not recognize the campaign” that Brazile “portrays in the book.”

And Tom Perez promises reform in the nominating process.

Update (February 14, 2018):  It is notable that two additional potential Democratic presidential candidates have announced they will refuse corporate PAC money.