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January 11 - I'll be taking the month of January off, and will begin posting again at the beginning of February. See you then!

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Greenland: A State of Rapid Collapse

 September 1, 2020 The good news, such as it is, goes like this: the suspense is over. No need to guess about whether sea level rise will be life-altering by the end of this century or not. It will, at least for the 40 percent of humankind which lives on or near a coastline. That's because all the ice on Greenland is going to melt, according to researchers at Ohio State University (yes, yes, I know - it's THE Ohio State University. Get over yourselves.) Their research appeared in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment in August. Total meltdown will take 10,000 years, but enough will have melted by 2100 to cause sea level rise of approximately three feet. That will cover a lot of coastal property, a loss made worse by storms and hurricanes. How have researchers reached this conclusion? By studying almost 40 years of satellite data. Glaciers on Greenland have shrunk so much since the year 2000 that even if global warming came to a complete stop, they would contin...

Truly, There's Nothing to be Afraid of

February 26, 2013 – The 1960s scared conservatives worse than I knew – worse than a lot of us knew, I guess.   Certainly I lived through that period.   Certainly young adults found their voices, and had the nerve to object to being put through the meat grinder called Vietnam.   Black Americans continued to seek justice and equality in their adopted homeland.   Change was inevitable.   It’s understandable that conservatives wanted a say in what those changes would be.   Their fearful reaction was – and is - badly overblown.   Others’ happiness is nothing to fear.     These longed-for changes cost conservatives nothing but their unearned, self-satisfied atrophy.   Young people went on dying, even so. It turns out all of that change scared the socks off market fundamentalists.   Determined to return the country to its previous perceived state of inertia, Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce, urging a sh...

The Environmental Polluting Agency

April 17, 2020 Under cover of an historic pandemic, the EPA has announced it will suspend enforcement of environmental laws. You read that right. The agency is hoping we're all so distracted that no one will notice. Why would they do this, you ask. It will come as no surprise that a number of industries, including oil, have asked for the suspension. In the words of EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler: EPA "recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID 19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements." Critics of the hiatus concede exceptions to regulations could be made on a case-by-case basis, for example, if companies are short-staffed because employees are working from home. But those industries deemed essential and continuing to operate should be expected to comply with the law. In fact, because COVID 19 is exacerbated by air pollution, leading to higher death rates, pol...