The Real World

In an interview with Lynn Parramore, Noam Chomsky points to papers by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen,and Jie Chen. Their work used patterns of campaign contributions to gain an understanding of how money functions in politics.

[The idea of Russian influence is] very hard to take seriously for a number of reasons. One reason is the work of Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues [“How Money Won [von Clownstick] the White House”]. There really is manipulation of elections, but it’s not coming from the Russians. It’s coming from the people who buy the elections. Take his study of the 2016 election [“Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: [Fuckface von Clownstick] and the 2016 Presidential Election”]. That’s how you interfere with elections. Or the pretty spectacular study that he and his colleagues did about a year ago on Congress “How Money Drives US Congressional Elections,” where you just get a straight line [correlation between money and major party votes in Congress]. You rarely see results like that in the social sciences. That’s massive manipulation. Compared with that, what the Russians might be doing is minuscule. Quite aside from the fact that the U.S. does it all the time in other countries.

Chomsky continues to drive home his contention on the biggest threats we face.

Climate change and nuclear war. These are really existential threats. And what’s happening now is just astonishing. If media were functioning seriously, every day the lead headline would be this amazing fact—that in the entire world, every country is trying or committed to doing at least something. One country—one!—the most powerful country in history—is committed to trying to destroy the climate. Not just pulling out of the efforts of others, but maximizing the use of the most destructive means.

There’s been nothing like this in history. It’s kind of an outrageous statement, but it happens to be true, that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. Nobody, not even the Nazis, was dedicated to destroying the possibility of organized human life. It’s just missing from the media. In fact, if you read, say, the sensible business press, the Financial Times, BusinessWeek, any of them, when they talk about fossil fuel production, the articles are all just about the prospect for profit. Is the U.S. moving to number one and what are the gains? Not that it’s going to wipe out organized human life. Maybe that’s a footnote somewhere. It’s pretty astonishing.

Update (July 7):  Another interview with Chomsky in which he reiterates how big donors were the ones who really interfered in the 2016 election with massive last-minute contributions to Republicans.

Red and Blue

Barack Obama became famous for saying, "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America". But the partisan divide has only hardened in the years since.

The latest World Happiness Report has America dropping four places to eighteenth.

Data suggest it’s no coincidence that relative unhappiness in the U.S. coincides with the election .... A June 2017 Gallup poll found that 25 percent of Americans listed the government as the most important problem facing the country, up from only 8 percent in October 2016.

Anand Giridharadas hopes that "Woke America" and "Great America" can somehow learn from each other.

Everyone is offended all the time, on both sides of the political divide. Taking offense is, in fact, one of the few things that brings us together. A Hollywood award show, a thermoplastic restroom sign, a visiting lecturer in a cardigan, a question about where one is from, a claim that black or blue or white or all lives matter — anything is fodder for the great American war of offense.

Woke America and Great America have lost the habit of genuinely arguing with each other. It takes a certain curiosity about, and hope for, other people to argue with them, and we seem to have fallen out of both those things.

There is a fine line between saying “this is why you’ll never understand me” and “here is what you’d see if you were me.” The intellectual underpinning is the same; the mission differs.

And Melanie McFarland points out how a handful of TV shows have tried to create dialog across this divide.

But Conor Lynch argues that a neoliberal consensus does broadly exist and that itself is a problem.

Though bipartisan politics is often hailed as responsible and respectable, there is nothing inherently good about compromise, especially when it ends up serving the economic elite and going against what the majority of Americans want, as is often the case in Washington today when Republicans and Democrats come together.

Lynch notes the widespread support for the economic agenda of Bernie Sanders and writes, "while the red-state/blue-state divide is real and deeply entrenched in American politics, the divide between economic elites and everyone else may be even more consequential in our populist age." Lynch reports that at a recent rally in Texas Sanders "rejected the hyper-partisan politics that have come to dominate our current era" and quotes him:

I've never believed in this blue-state, red-state nonsense. Yes, Lubbock voted overwhelmingly [Republican]. But any county in this country, which has people who are struggling, can and must become a progressive county.

Update:  A voter study finds that "[t]he number of voters who cast a ballot for Obama in 2012 and did not vote in 2016, or voted for a third-party candidate, outnumbered those Obama voters who pulled the lever for [the Republican]". They are generally non-white, younger, and lower income but not necessarily the most liberal.

Update (March 19):  Paul Rosenberg discusses the concept of "asymmetric polarization". He refers to the paper “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” by Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen.

[K]ey conservative political actors — from the Federalist Society to the Koch brothers' network — have long been intensely focused on just this sort of political struggle. Progressives cannot be expected to win battles in which they do not even show up, or at best bring a yogurt spoon to a nuclear war. And well-meaning “good government” types repeatedly do more harm than good as they reinforce a situation of one-sided disarmament.

Update (March 26):  In an interview with Chauncey DeVega, authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt discuss the future of U.S. democracy. Ziblatt:

The Republican Party is desperate. It fears that it is not going to be able to win elections, so bending and breaking rules to cheat their way into electoral victories becomes a preferred strategy. The rules that 30-plus state legislatures in the United States have adopted over the last decade have made it harder for people who are, by and large, lower-income nonwhite voters to register and to vote. That is deeply undemocratic. As long as the Republican Party is an overwhelmingly white and Christian party in a society as diverse as the United States, it is going to be prone to this kind of white-nationalist extremism. The Republicans must become a more diverse party.

Levitsky:

If in the fall of 2018 or in 2020 there is a shift to the Democrats, this, in principle, could prompt a reevaluation on the side of the Republicans to "refound" the party. Looking at cases around the world, in countries like Germany after World War II or Chile after Pinochet there have been efforts, after major catastrophes, for groups to reorganize themselves. It is difficult, but we don't really have any other options. It's probably naïve to think about going back to the norms that we had before. Probably we'll evolve in some forward direction, but it certainly did not have to be this sort of no-holds-barred partisan warfare that we've seen in the last couple of decades. If our democracy is going to remain even minimally healthy we need to develop a set of norms that allow our political parties to work through institutions.

It's very hard, really it's impossible, for me to think of a democracy in the world that survived an ethnic majority making a transition to minority status. There really has not been a successful experiment with multiethnic democracy in the world, and that's why the growing diversification of Western democracies is a real challenge. Looking at the reaction of the Republican Party over the last 10 or 20 years to these trends scares me a lot.

What gives me some room for optimism, and what makes me think that the United States has a shot to be the first successful multiethnic democracy, is that our democratic institutions are in fact quite strong. I think we did -- helped a lot by World War II -- a pretty decent job as a society of integrating immigrant groups that arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was pretty nasty, it was hardly a model, but we did it. So as a society, we have much more experience with dealing with diversity and with integration than do other Western societies. That's how I put myself to sleep at night.

Update (April 1):  A Pew Research Center study finds a growing education attainment gap between Democrats and Republicans. And, an on-line survey finds that supporters share a number of traits with Dear Leader: selfishness, a desire for power over others, preoccupation with money, and a preference for social traditions.

Also, a paper by lead author Andrew Whitehead shows that "greater adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was a robust predictor of voting for" von Clownstick. Paul Rosenberg explains.

When push comes to shove, the more vicious the leader, the better. The moral restraints of the deeply pious are the last thing you want for the job. Hence, [Fuckface's] impious leadership makes perfect sense, once you realize what’s at stake. It’s a feature, not a bug. And evangelical voters, Whitehead argues, know it.

Update (April 2):  Elizabeth Mika in an interview with Chauncey DeVega.

Having no conscience, [von Clownstick] does not experience guilt or shame or remorse, so he can say whatever pleases him at the moment to get people to do whatever he wants or needs of them.

People fell for this because they want what he has to offer. Ultimately, [Fuckface] embodies values that people do not necessarily want to admit to.

Update (April 8):  In an interview with David Letterman, Jay Z had an interesting thought about the current administration.

I think it’s actually a great thing, and here's why.

What he’s forcing people to do is have a conversation ... and work together. Like, you can't really address something that’s not revealed.

He's bringing out an ugly side of America that we wanted to believe was gone .... And we still gotta deal with it. We have to have tough conversations. We have to talk about the N-word, and we have to talk about why white men are so privileged in this country.

Update (April 15):  Conor Lynch argues that populism needn't be a threat to democracy.

Over the past several years, it has become clear that young people are embracing political and economic alternatives to the status quo, but this hardly means they are rejecting democracy. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that they are rejecting capitalism. ... [I]t seems likely that we are headed into a populist age. The task for the left, then, is to shape this populist age by offering a credible and convincing alternative to the defeated and ineffective neoliberal agenda.

Update (April 29):  Paul Rosenberg explains a state level legislative initiative called "Project Blitz".

The agenda underlying these bills is not merely about Christian nationalism, a term that describes an Old Testament-based worldview fusing Christian and American identities, and meant to sharpen the divide between those who belong to those groups and those who are excluded. It’s also ultimately "dominionist," meaning that it doubles down on the historically false notion of America as a “Christian nation” to insist that a particular sectarian view of God should control every aspect of life, through all manner of human institutions.

Update (May 6):  This is how far apart Americans are.

According to [an] NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, 76 percent of Republicans believe [Dear Leader] tells the truth “most of the time.”

[But] 94 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners—and 76 percent of independents polled—[said] they believe [Fuckface] tells the truth “only some of the time or even less frequently.”

Update (May 12):  Conor Lynch discusses how "aggrieved entitlement" leads angry, young white men to reactionary politics.

Ultimately the same thing that has driven left-wing populism has driven this politics of reaction: a legitimate feeling of discontent with the status quo. There are plenty of valid reasons to be disillusioned with the modern world, of course, but this dissatisfaction can lead one to embrace either a reactionary politics that fetishizes the past, or a progressive politics that aims to create a better future.

Update (May 13):  When Sam Haselby says it's time to question American patriotism, I think he's referring to what is called nationalism in other countries.

The sacred status of American patriotism in the US indicates only an ideological strength, not moral or intellectual soundness.

Sarah Silverman made a distinction between "we're number one" versus "we are one".

Update (December 17):  Paul Rosenberg follows up on Project Blitz strategy and progressive efforts to fight back.

Against Reason?

In a review of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker, Simon McCarthy-Jones argues that the dictates of reason can conflict with the need for autonomy.

For example, imagine there is a political candidate or option being widely portrayed as the obvious and perhaps only sane choice. Could this drive some voters to vote for the alternative (potentially even against their own rational self-interests) in order to feel they are choosing freely?

And Elizabeth Preza reports on a study that found fear to be a more effective factor in recent elections.

According to University of Austin psychology professor Sam Gosling—one of the study’s co-authors—of the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), "regions highest on neuroticism are particularly receptive to political campaigns that emphasize danger and loss and that previous campaigns have not tapped into these themes as strongly as we saw in 2016".

Chauncey DeVega makes the connection between that appeal to fear and a growing sense of unhappiness.

A public that is miserable and in pain will often withdraw from politics and communal life. As seen with Republicans' high levels of support among precisely those voters who are most likely to be hurt by their policies, political sadism can be used as a type of fuel for racism, prejudice and white supremacy. There the pain and anger of White America is directed at some enemy Other who is black or brown, an immigrant or a Muslim, instead of at the corporate elites and gangster capitalists who drive the Republican agenda.

Conor Lynch takes issue with how Pinker overlooks the problems stemming from the Enlightenment.

[I]n Pinker’s account, what he calls “progressophobia” is not just prevalent on the right, where reactionaries long for the “good old days” and reject modernity out of hand, but on the left, where pessimistic progressives constantly deny or ignore much of the progress of the 20th century.

Being ruthlessly critical of the modern world does not make one anti-modern, just as being critical of American foreign policy does not make one anti-American. Modernity is a mixed and often contradictory affair, and acknowledging that does not make one a pessimist, a postmodernist or a “progressophobe.” In fact, it is necessary for any true progressive.

DeVega agrees that quietism is not the same as optimism.

While they are often easy vulnerable prey for demagogues, a public that is in misery and pain is also one which can be mobilized for radical, forward-thinking social and political change that can reinvigorate our democracy.

Update (January 26, 2019):  Phil Torres is not kind to Steven Pinker's book.

Mined quotes, cherry-picked data, false dichotomies, misrepresented research, misleading statements and outright false assertions on nearly every page.

Update (October 20, 2019):  Torres is generally annoyed with white, male "intellectuals".

Pinker and his ilk don't acknowledge errors when they make them; they are ideologues rather than truth-seekers, willing to bend the facts, launch personal attacks and censor critics to "win" debates. At exactly the moment in history when we need true intellectual leadership, people who exemplify intellectual honesty and integrity, the most, we get stubborn tribespeople.

Income Inequality Still Growing

Alex Henderson notes that the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is going to make inequality worse in the U.S. and quotes Warren Buffett.

[T]he wealth of the 400 [richest people in America] increased 29-fold—from $93 billion to $2.7 trillion—while many millions of hardworking citizens remained stuck on an economic treadmill. During this period, the tsunami of wealth didn’t trickle down. It surged upward.

The U.S. compares unfavorably to Europe.

The 2018 World Inequality Report ... paints a troubling picture of the United States' wealth distribution. According to the study, the top 1 percent of wage earners went from owning 11 percent of the national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016. The bottom 50 percent's share of the national income dropped from 21 to 13 percent over the same time period. In Western Europe, the 1 percent's control of national incomes has risen from 10 to 12 percent, while the bottom 50 percent's share has held steady at 23 percent—undesirable, perhaps, but decidedly more equal.

Update (February 16, 2019):  How bad does it have to be if Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says income inequality is the country's biggest challenge? He notes that income growth for most people has decreased while "growth at the top has been very strong".

Strike

Amid the on-going teachers strike in West Virginia, now Oklahoma teachers are considering a strike over the failure to raise salaries.

Oklahoma is ranked 49th in the nation in teacher salaries, according to a 2016 study by the National Education Association. The average elementary school teacher makes $41,150, middle school teachers earn $42,380 and high school teachers make $42,460, according to a 2016 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The last time teachers were given a raise was 2008, the Oklahoma Education Association says. On top of that, the education budget has been cut by about 28% over the last 10 years.

Update:  Just today, the Governor of West Virginia signed a bill giving a 5 percent raise to teachers and state employees. The strike is over, but the state will pay for the raises with budget cuts in other areas.

Update (March 15):  More about the implications of the strike. Amy Traub:

Faced with jobs that don’t pay enough to make ends meet, health-care costs that break the budget, and public services exposed to countless rounds of cutbacks despite a growing economy, working people will push back.

Update (March 29):  Even though the Oklahoma Legislature passed the first tax increase since 1990, teachers there say it doesn't make up for ten years of neglect and plan to go on strike.

Update (March 30):  Oklahoma is on the verge and Kentucky has had some school closures.

Update (April 2):  Oklahoma is now on strike. And a rally in Kentucky.

Thousands of teachers and public workers from across Kentucky flocked to the state Capitol on Monday morning to protest potential budget cuts to public education and the passage, last week, of a controversial package of changes to the state’s public pension system that teachers had opposed.

Update (April 4):  Oklahoma Republicans aren't happy.

Update (April 8):  Arizona could be next.

Also, Dave Jamieson and Travis Waldron look at the history of teacher strikes.

There’s a short explanation for why these low-tax, GOP-controlled states are now facing rebellion: They have slashed public school funding significantly since the Great Recession, while also pursuing many tax cuts that have benefited businesses and the wealthy. The budget shortfalls that austerity has created have left no money to pump into schools or salaries, leading to teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and even four-day school weeks in Oklahoma. Teachers forced to take on second or third jobs have finally decided they’ve had enough.

But the longer explanation stretches back a full generation, to when teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky last walked off the job.

The work stoppages led to meaningful raises and investment at the time. But the promise they held eventually lost out to the anti-tax ideology of both legislators and voters.

Update (April 26):  Walkouts today in Arizona.

Update (May 11):  Nicole Braun notes that adjunct instructors don't necessarily get as much attention as striking public school teachers.

Update (May 16):  North Carolina teachers held a large protest.

Update (June 10):  Henry Giroux writes in support of striking teachers.

Under the current era of neoliberal fascism, education is especially dangerous when it does the bridging work between schools and the wider society, between the self and others, and allows students to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. Schools are dangerous because they exemplify Richard J. Bernstein’s idea in "The Abuse of Evil" that “democracy is ‘a way of life,’ an ethical ideal that demands active and constant attention. And if we fail to work at creating and re-creating democracy, there is no guarantee that it will survive.”

... 

Rejecting the idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold, teachers and students across the country are reclaiming education as a public good and a human right, a protective space that should be free of violence and open to critical teaching and learning. Not only is it a place to think, engage in critical dialogue, encourage human potential and contribute to the vibrancy of a democratic polity, it is also a place in which the social flourishes, in that students and teachers learn to think and act together.

Update (January 14, 2019):  United Teachers Los Angeles rejected a contract offer last Friday and now over 30,000 union members are on strike for the first time in 30 years.

The union’s demand for reduced class sizes (some classes have more than 40 students) and more support staff are at the heart of the negotiations. The union also seeks a 6.5-percent raise, but union leaders say salary is only one piece of a puzzle. They also point to such shortfalls as elementary schools only having a school nurse one or two days a week, which the union says risks children’s safety.

Update (January 16, 2019):  Glenn Sacks reports on the Los Angeles teacher's strike.

One of the best things about the LA teacher revolt is the way it has helped wake the country up about the charter scam. Many articles in recent days have debunked the myth that charters are better and have detailed the way they’ve damaged traditional schools.

It was especially satisfying today at our massive rally outside the offices of the California Charter Schools Association’s offices downtown. The CCSA bought the LA School Board (in what was the most expensive school board election in US history) and the boardmembers they bankrolled installed Beutner as superintendent. Today the ladies and gentlemen of the CCSA no doubt looked out their office windows and realized that they’d been made.

Update (January 22, 2019):  The UTLA has reached an agreement that will end the strike after six school days.

Update (February 6, 2019):  Today marks 100 years since the Seattle General Strike. Steven Beda sees an important lesson even though the strike failed.

For today’s workers tired of decades of wage stagnation and fleeting benefits in the gig economy, the Seattle General Strike offers an important lesson about the power of organized laborers: When united, workers can take on the most powerful foes.

Update (February 11, 2019):  Denver teachers are on strike for the first time in 25 years.

Update (February 18, 2019):  West Virginia teachers announce another strike over charter schools.

Update (February 21, 2019):  With the charter school bill tabled, the West Virginia strike has ended. And now Oakland teachers are on strike.

Update (March 1, 2019):  The Oakland strike has ended with a significant raise and smaller classes.

Update (October 16, 2019):  Chicago teachers are going on strike.

Update (November 2, 2019):  The Chicago Teachers Union has reached a settlement.

Disgusting

Survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting are speaking out, and gun fanatics don't like it. In Florida, condemning pornography was deemed more important than banning assault weapons.

The students have been shamefully attacked. Two were accused of being "actors that travel to various crises when they happen". A video spreading conspiracy theories had to be removed from YouTube. A Texas district threatened to suspend protesters.

And the cowards in government don't give a shit about trying to stop mass shootings. They've decided that any number of deaths, every few weeks or so, is simply the price to pay for an imaginary "freedom".

Update (February 24):  Andrew O'Hehir applauds teenagers for opposing inaction and cynicism.

It was profoundly satisfying to see [Dear Leader] and Marco Rubio and NRA spokesbot Dana Loesch and various Fox News talking heads taken completely off guard, as a narrative they thought they understood spun out of control. How dare these kids express forceful and angry opinions, instead of weeping incoherently in the parking lot or organizing silent prayer vigils? The far-right conspiracy theories describing the Parkland young people and others like them as “crisis actors” — as far as I know, a term Alex Jones simply made up — is both a projection and an admission of weakness. Anyone who challenges the increasingly elaborate fictions through which the American right constructs its worldview must themselves be fictional.

Update (February 28):  Cody Fenwick reports on polls showing more enthusiasm on the side of gun control advocates.

Update (March 14):  One month after the Parkland, Florida shooting, thousands of students held walkouts all over the country to protest gun violence. Listening to a news report reminded me that among the schools participating are several with their own victims to commemorate.

Update (March 15):  Jeremy Adam Smith discusses a study that finds half of the guns in the U.S. are owned by only three percent of the population--and they are stockpiling even more.

The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives.

Update (March 23):  Hundreds of thousands of students are expected at the March For Our Lives.

Update (March 25):  Even as they uphold the interests of the gun manufacturers, the NRA claims to be the group truly concerned with children's safety.

Today’s protests aren’t spontaneous. Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones.

Update (March 26):  The disgusting smears against teenagers continues.

[T]he right is attempting to weaponize the Parkland survivor's newfound fame in the form of a photoshopped image of her tearing up a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

Update (March 27):  John Paul Stevens criticizes a 2008 Supreme Court decision that prevented Washington, D.C. from enforcing strict gun control for constitutional reasons.

Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the NRA’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

Update (March 29):  Fearless indeed.

Several companies announced Thursday that they were pulling the plug on advertising during Laura Ingraham’s show after the Fox News host bashed a teen survivor of the Parkland school shooting.

The companies’ announcements came a day after Ingraham mocked David Hogg, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, for not getting accepted into a few of the colleges he’d applied to.

In response, Hogg called on people to pressure a dozen companies to remove their ads from Ingraham’s programs.

Hogg and his 14-year-old sister, Lauren, responded to Ingraham’s attack Wednesday night, calling out the Fox News host for cyberbullying students.

Update (July 25):  After a mass shooting, Toronto seeks to ban the sale of all handguns.

Irreversible

Robert Hunziker and Jeff McMahon relay the warning of James Anderson of Harvard University.

The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn't been seen in 12 million years ... and this pollution is rapidly pushing the climate back to its state in the Eocene Epoch, more than 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole.

"The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today ... and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would have meant that storm systems would be violent in the extreme."

People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions .... Recovery is all but impossible ... without a World War II-style transformation of industry.

"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero. ... Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no. ... People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem."

Update:  This warning seems to be backed up by Eric Holthaus' report that global sea ice is at a record low.

Update (February 24):  Passed along by a colleague, the Onion probably gets it about right.

Sighing, Resigned Climate Scientists Say To Just Enjoy Next 20 Years As Much As You Can

Update (February 27):  The North Pole just experienced temperatures 30 degrees Celsius warmer than usual.

Temperatures may have soared as high as 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) at the pole, according to the U.S. Global Forecast System model.

Update (March 2):  Andrew Glikson discusses climate tipping points.

Update (March 3):  "The rich are destroying the Earth."

Update (March 6):  Last month was the warmest February for the arctic in the temperature record. Ruth Mottram:

[W]e’ve actually got open water at the top of Greenland right now, which is incredibly unusual.

Update (March 12):  In an interview with David Wallace-Wells, Wallace Smith Broecker discusses the need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as well as replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

[I]t’s hugely expensive to do all that. I’m very optimistic in most things, but not about this. This is a huge problem, and we don’t have a clue how to solve it. It’s got to involve a tax, and the word tax is death to a politician.

[I]f we’re ever going to get this thing solved, we’re going to need an international group that has a lot of authority. It’ll have to be like the Fed, but to manage carbon. That would mean we’d all have to give up a lot of our sovereignty, but I think that’s the only way it would happen. It couldn’t be the U.N., because the U.N. doesn’t have the power. They’d have to be able to penalize, they’d probably have to have an army, because cheating would be very, very lucrative.

I’d say it’s one chance in a thousand. I mean, we may get to that. Maybe China will get so powerful that it can start to dictate. That’s what we need. Our democracy is shot, I think. It just doesn’t work.

Update (March 25):  Melting permafrost creates a positive feedback through the release of carbon. Chris Mooney describes a study published in Nature Climate Change as "suggest[ing] that methane releases could be considerably more prevalent as Arctic permafrost thaws".

Current studies report a minor importance of CH4 production in water-saturated (anoxic) permafrost soils and a stronger permafrost carbon–climate feedback from drained (oxic) soils. Here we show through seven-year laboratory incubations that equal amounts of CO2 and CH4 are formed in thawing permafrost under anoxic conditions after stable CH4-producing microbial communities have established.

Or, as Mooney writes:

The research finds that in waterlogged wetland soils, where oxygen is not prevalent, tiny microorganisms will produce a considerable volume of methane, a gas that doesn’t last in the air much more than a decade but has a warming effect many times that of carbon dioxide over a period of 100 years.

Update (April 22):  Thirty percent of the Great Barrier Reef died in 2016. And, there's an increasing "mismatch" in the availability of food.

A paper by ecologists at the University of Ottawa examined 88 species on four continents, and more than 50 relationships between predator and pray as well as herbivores and the plants they eat, and found that food chain events are taking place earlier in the year than they have in the past, because of the warming climate.

Also, while the administration does its best to destroy environmental protections, Anthony Ingraffea says that if natural gas fracking wells grow in number as expected, the world may cross the 2 degree Celsius warming threshold in 10 to 15 years. This is based on previous research at Cornell University showing that "shale gas" could have a worse climate impact than coal.

Update (May 5):  A battle is brewing over the Colorado River basin.

Update (May 14):  Referring to the water crisis in Cape Town, Robert Hunziker quotes Peter Johnston.

We are careening towards disaster on all fronts — whether it’s agriculture, pollution, soil, water, pesticides. The human race is hell-bent on destruction. It’s a case of looking at the future and saying we’re going to have to get used to using less water on a permanent basis.

Update (June 25):  Rather than "addiction to oil", Lance Olsen quotes John Platt for a different analogy--that climate change is the consequence of a "social trap".

The term refers to situations ... where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back out of or to avoid.

Olsen explains that oil companies used to deny responsibility because consumption, not extraction of oil is what really caused rising carbon dioxide levels. It seems like innovations like agriculture or the internal combustion engine are examples of traps--eminently logical at the time but now nearly inescapable problems.

Update (June 26):  Russian energy interests may be hindering European Union efforts to reduce emissions. And in a possibly another example of a social trap, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed lawsuits against oil companies by California cities saying that the problem of climate change is too big for one person to solve.

Noting that the world has reaped many benefits from fossil fuels since the dawn of the industrial era, the San Francisco-based judge said “questions of how to appropriately balance ... worldwide negatives against the worldwide positives of the energy itself” must be handled by the U.S. government’s executive and legislative branches.

Update (July 5):  A report from the Climate Council warns that bleaching events are likely to become more frequent threatening the survival of the Great Barrier Reef.

Limiting temperature rise above pre-industrial levels to no more than 1.5°C is critical for the survival of at least some reefs worldwide. A global average temperature increase of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels would put 70 percent of coral reefs at risk of long-term degradation by 2100 and a rise of 2°C would put 99 percent of coral reefs at risk.

[G]lobal greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 at the latest and track steeply downwards thereafter, reaching net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.

Update (July 6):  If there's a lethal heat wave in Canada, then we are truly fucked. And, Quriyat, Oman recorded the hottest daily low temperature of 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Update (July 8):  A study published in Nature Geoscience argues that current predictions for the impact of climate change may be underestimates.

Comparison of palaeo observations with climate model results suggests that, due to the lack of certain feedback processes, model-based climate projections may underestimate long-term warming in response to future radiative forcing by as much as a factor of two, and thus may also underestimate centennial-to-millennial-scale sea-level rise.

Update (July 15):  Of all the consequences for climate change, I don't remember anything about the possibility of a giant iceberg off the coast of a city threatening to cause tsunamis if it breaks apart.

The more than 300-foot-tall iceberg towers over the village of 169 people on the west coast of the country. A video posted on Twitter shows a chunk of ice breaking off the massive block and plunging into the sea, sending large waves curling around shore.

This is Greenland, but could it happen next to a much larger population center?

Update (July 25):  Methane concentrations continue to increase with no clear explanation. Heat waves in the Northern Hemisphere may have pushed Siberia to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. But at least it's a fair fight.

Fossil fuel producers, airlines and electrical utilities outspent environmental groups and the renewable energy industry 10 to 1 on lobbying related to climate change legislation between 2000 and 2016.

Update (July 28):  The Washington Post summarizes events that are becoming all too routine.

“The old records belong to a world that no longer exists,” said Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Update (August 24):  Some of the oldest and thickest sea ice is breaking up off the northern coast of Greenland.

Update (December 10):  A study published in Nature Climate Change finds that the Great Barrier Reef tolerated a heat wave in 2017 better than the year before. And yet, half the corals were lost in the two years.

Update (August 18, 2019):  A paper by Robert Howarth finds that the rise in methane emissions since 2006 is associated with fracked shale gas. And 89 percent of that production comes from the U.S.

Update (August 31, 2019):  A report published by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority downgrades the prospects for the reef from "poor" to "very poor".

The findings directly point to runaway climate change spurred by greenhouse gas emissions as the prime threat to the structure, noting that the time to protect the reef's "long-term future is now".