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Month: December 2018

The Arctic is in even worse shape than you realize

The Arctic is in even worse shape than you realize

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The Washington Post reports: Over the past three decades of global warming, the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by a stunning 95 percent, according the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual Arctic Report Card. The finding suggests that the sea at the top of the world has already morphed into a new and very different state, with major implications not only for creatures such as walruses and polar bears but, in the long term, perhaps for…

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Climate change is not only influencing extreme weather events, it’s causing them

Climate change is not only influencing extreme weather events, it’s causing them

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Brandon Miller writes: Extreme weather events that spanned the globe in 2017 have been directly linked to — and in some cases were even caused by — continued warming of the planet via human influence through greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report. For the second year in a row, the annual report from the American Meteorological Society found weather extremes that could not have happened without human-caused warming of the climate. Advances in scientific modeling and additional climbs…

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Former senators call on current senators to put national interest above party and self interest

Former senators call on current senators to put national interest above party and self interest

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In an open letter, 44 former U.S. senators write: Dear Senate colleagues, As former members of the U.S. Senate, Democrats and Republicans, it is our shared view that we are entering a dangerous period, and we feel an obligation to speak up about serious challenges to the rule of law, the Constitution, our governing institutions and our national security. We are on the eve of the conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and the House’s commencement of…

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Solzhenitsyn did more than anyone to bring the Soviet Union to its knees

Solzhenitsyn did more than anyone to bring the Soviet Union to its knees

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Michael Scammell writes: When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, pundits offered a variety of reasons for its failure: economic, political, military. Few thought to add a fourth, more elusive cause: the regime’s total loss of credibility. This hard-to-measure process had started in 1956, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave his so-called secret speech to party leaders, in which he denounced Josef Stalin’s purges and officially revealed the existence of the gulag prison system. Not long afterward, Boris Pasternak allowed his…

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How the Koch Foundation fuels the hard-right cause in Britain

How the Koch Foundation fuels the hard-right cause in Britain

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George Monbiot writes: Dark money is among the greatest current threats to democracy. It means money spent below the public radar, that seeks to change political outcomes. It enables very rich people and corporations to influence politics without showing their hands. Among the world’s biggest political spenders are Charles and David Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries, a vast private conglomerate of oil pipelines and refineries, chemicals, timber and paper companies, commodity trading firms and cattle ranches. If their two fortunes…

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An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

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By Deborah M Gordon Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This question leads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the…

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Europe holds its breath as Macron scrambles to quell protests

Europe holds its breath as Macron scrambles to quell protests

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The Guardian reports: Not just France but Europe should hope the tax concessions and minimum wage rise Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday will prove sufficient to quell more than a month of violent and destabilising anti-government protests. With more than 1,250 people arrested, 400 injured and an economic cost running into billions, the gilets jaunes revolt represents a formidable challenge to the authority of the centrist president, widely seen by his critics as arrogant and out of touch. If he…

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France’s Yellow Vest protesters want to fight climate change

France’s Yellow Vest protesters want to fight climate change

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The New Republic reports: Nearly 2,000 people were arrested during anti-government protests in France over the weekend, the fourth in a row that the Yellow Vest demonstrations have turned violent. French President Emmanuel Macron has not yet addressed his country’s growing crisis. (He is expected to do so on Monday.) But America’s president did so on Saturday, arguing that the violence is proof that no one wants to fight climate change. The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for…

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Facebook and Twitter face growing scrutiny for their role in sparking France’s ‘Gilets Jaunes’ protests

Facebook and Twitter face growing scrutiny for their role in sparking France’s ‘Gilets Jaunes’ protests

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VentureBeat reports: The French government announced it is investigating the possibility that Russia manipulated social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter to foment discord that has inspired growing protests across the country. The Gilets Jaunes or “yellow vests,” appeared at first to be largely a spontaneous social movement of protestors angry about an impending tax on diesel that is aimed at fighting climate change. The original complaint that this fell disproportionately on the backs of poor and rural residents…

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Brexit: UK can unilaterally revoke article 50, says European Court of Justice

Brexit: UK can unilaterally revoke article 50, says European Court of Justice

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The Guardian reports: The UK can unilaterally stop the Brexit process, the European court of justice has said in a ruling that will boost demands for a second EU referendum. The court concluded that any EU member state can revoke an article 50 process without needing approval from every other member state, but only before its withdrawal comes into force. “The United Kingdom is free to revoke unilaterally the notification of its intention to withdraw from the EU,” the ECJ…

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How a powerful Russian propaganda machine chips away at Western notions of truth

How a powerful Russian propaganda machine chips away at Western notions of truth

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The Washington Post reports: The initial plan was a Cold War classic — brutal yet simple. Two Russian agents would slip onto the property of a turncoat spy in Britain and daub his front door with a rare military-grade poison designed to produce an agonizing and untraceable death. But when the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal was botched, the mission quickly shifted. Within hours, according to British and U.S. officials who closely followed the events, a very different kind of…

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Vast ecosystem beneath the Earth’s surface discovered

Vast ecosystem beneath the Earth’s surface discovered

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The Guardian reports: The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of that found in all the world’s oceans. Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet. Researchers at the Deep…

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The steward of Middle-earth

The steward of Middle-earth

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Hannah Long writes: Around the time Christopher [Tolkien] was commissioned an officer in the RAF in 1945, [J.R.R.] Tolkien was calling his son “my chief critic and collaborator.” Christopher would return from flying missions to pore over another chapter of his father’s work. He also joined the informal literary club known as the Inklings. At 21, he was the youngest—and is now the last surviving—member. The band of friends—J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and Charles Williams, among…

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The planet has seen sudden warming before. It wiped out almost everything

The planet has seen sudden warming before. It wiped out almost everything

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Carl Zimmer writes: Some 252 million years ago, Earth almost died. In the oceans, 96 percent of all species became extinct. It’s harder to determine how many terrestrial species vanished, but the loss was comparable. This mass extinction, at the end of the Permian Period, was the worst in the planet’s history, and it happened over a few thousand years at most — the blink of a geological eye. On Thursday, a team of scientists offered a detailed accounting of…

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